The White Door (4 page)

She remembered, however, the rough nature of Chinese society in New Zealand. Almost all refugee stock. Son could not abide them. Strange that he was now happiest amongst the warring tribesmen of the world. But he could escape them if need be – possessor of the eternal plane ticket, the patient heart could fly away, before they imploded beneath the weight of their parochialisms. When he was young, planes, like universities, seemed like the dreams of far horizons. Thus trapped, he grew a species of shy but surly good manners – always distant, almost always judgemental, pretending he could no longer speak Chinese, acculturating in New Zealand with zeal, until one day he had successfully lost all refugee language, began coming top of his class at school, and was henceforth coached by cherishing teachers, all women, towards the distant academy.

One winter, the young Chinese pianist Fou Ts’ong toured New Zealand. The local Chinese community was awe-struck – a celebrity on the terms imposed not only by Europeans but the strange demands of European culture. The rough burghers of oriental Auckland sought a means of entertaining Fou during his sojourn from the artistic metropoles of the world. Finally, they packed him off to dinner with the younger brother of Meil Wah’s husband. He was an electric guitarist. It was the closest to Fou’s world they could find, but the young aspiring rock star knew nothing about Débussy, Chopin or Schubert, all the composers whose work Fou would interpret with such solemn tenderness. The dinner was unbearably stilted, and the patient heart
wore a smirk that basically said, I told you so, and I’m getting out of this hole you call the life of the Chinese. Fou is Chinese, but the wide world is in his soul and plane tickets are in his hands. Fou had, however, thought Meil Wah, delivered her one extravagant courtesy – said she looked like a portrait of Empress Wu – and her young mother’s heart loved the strange pianist and his chivalry, and chimed briefly like the girl’s it had been before arranged marriage, children because birth control had been unknown to her and her husband, before the years of servitude to her in-laws and the hardships of setting up a struggling business of their own. Her unmortgaged heart seized the pianist, and that silent wilful drinking of him sought to replace her stolen youth, and this was a part still in her as she thundered, and rattled, back to Guangdung.

Meanwhile, the patient heart was still measuring water levels for the houseboat of his imagination. He was singing softly on the plane, had requisitioned a tripartite service – saké, coffee, then champagne – and the stewardess, by now marvelling at his capacity, and seeming to see for the first time the compacted scar tissue and bruising on his arms, wondered what sort of man, mad or criminal, she now served. ‘There’ll be tattoos on his back next,’ she thought, and she recognised his melody. He also was recognising his melody and was thinking of the New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere and a painting that made ‘melody’ grow into ‘malady’, and how he had always wanted the chain of painted words to grow into ‘my lady’ and then, like each of his drinks, he could fasten the world with definitions to do with song, sickness and sex, and it was all reverie on the edge of self-absorbed drunkenness, but he recognised his own song, saw she recognised the song, so he beckoned her to come and sang it to her, a Tim Hardin song which he sang to prefigure his return after ten years away to New Zealand. ‘Here I am back home again, I’m here to rest, don’t ask me where I’ve been, just know that I’ve been West. I’m the family’s unknown boy, (here, he had forgotten the words but had invented his own) long black locks of raven hair, all the girls with their faces bare see the shine in the black sheep boy. Now if you love me, just let me live in peace, and please understand that the black sheep can
wear a golden fleece…’ An unashamed sentimentalist, thought the stewardess, but she wiped the tears his nostalgia, tiredness and guilt had brought to his right eye, kissed the air near his face, and told him gently to sleep. She took away his cups and glasses. He saw a sunrise in the virtual reality of his well-dreamt London river.

‘Named for a high-flyer,’ he explained. ‘One who could, with ease, fling himself into space. These twenty-two stories wouldn’t bother him. Not even the top of the Eiffel Tower. I’ve been there, and imagined the cool air on which a man could ride. But perhaps, after all, not here. Not where the atmosphere seems baked, and a man’s blue glide would seem ostentatious. Overseas, you know, they do it all the time. Everybody. They all have the chance to leap the bar. Here, they say No Leaping, as the bars are in short supply. You may leap as soon as the spare parts are imported. But only if you are literate enough to fill in the forms, triplicate, and patient enough to await the reply of the Ministry of Bars. Comrade, you think I am drunk. And making bad puns about the time it takes to get a simple gin and tonic in this place. You think all this talk of dancing on the zephyrs is just hot air, eh? Your silly friend, Dædalus Mumba, highly inflated with his very recent overseas education, restraining himself from bursting into French, but starting to get annoying all the same. Ah, but no, for half a song, a decent song, not the crap they play tonight, I would step out into the night’s embrace, and sail like a man of virtue. Ah yes, virtue. And who else, in this stage-set from yesterday’s megabucks disaster movie, could do that? If fire breaks out, who would carry you on stairs like starry cushions to the ground floor? And what a joke that would be. You can see the mad scramble. A whole building with no sprinklers. The fire engines can reach only the fourth floor.
How many ministers and members of the Central Committee would love Dædalus Mumba then? Rescue our high-living and very spoilt sons and daughters, Dædalus, please! And then Lusaka would see an amazing sight, eh? In the style of angels, I’d ferry these gyrating brats. But, instead of delivering them straight, bypass the anxious arms of their overstuffed parents, set them down perhaps in the dustiest shanty, from that distance watch the tall tower consumed by fire, and Studio 22, the disco in the skies, puff up like a cherry. Ha, and we’d all sit there, awaiting the flotilla of their parents’ Mercedes, and the greetings of the shanty-dwellers, roused at midnight, demanding water, salt, sugar, soap, cooking oil. Whatever else is short right now. A return to subsidies on the mealie meal. A stand against the IMF. Even the import and re-distribution of new leather belts so that, very co-operatively, they would have something to tighten. Preferably around the midriffs of those coming for sons and daughters. See the fat squeezed over, like melting lard, splashing inside imported shirts. And, oh yes, do you think we’re finally getting some service in this place?

Of all things, he had been a Commonwealth Scholar in New Zealand. She fingered one of the books he had brought back, had carried on his travels. He wasn’t carrying it now, so he’d have to come back again to claim the book, claim her. An old book, published in 1973, the New Zealand poet Murray Edmond, and the characters of the book were the same characters he had known. A painter named Gordon, who wore Chairman Mao dungarees. Kathryn, clearly Italian, occupation unknown, who read other people’s newspapers, smoked people’s cigarettes. And there was a nice line:

The sun is coming up

& 3000 jets are in the air.

Ah, she thought, no jets of sun in the Oxford winter. Just the same low sky. Dreaming spires could almost puncture sky if clouds came
down, oh, perhaps… measuring from her window, another inch or two. Well, she felt simply desolate. Ten days since sun last appeared. And it hadn’t even rained properly. Just this greyness and some mediocre drizzle. Sky, we’d like some dramatics, please. If you can’t manage a thunderstorm, we’d like you to retire to Ireland. We want either sun, or the certainty of wearing raincoats or not. We, who are simply desolate, do not wish to feel simple – caught in your drizzles.

Anyway, it was now time to go out. She’d wear her coat,
half-wondered
whether she should sail out on her bike, umbrella held aloft in the Amsterdam style. Not that she needed to be present at the lab. The gels would not yet be dried. But, after lunch, Rosa’s friends would telephone, and the contingent of them, New Zealand exiles, assorted Africanists, even some Africans, would gossip and, since this was the item of the week, would invariably discuss Walker’s proposal to Dianna. Lists of incompatibility. He was using her. She was using him. He might think she’s made in heaven, but it can’t last. And I’m sure, Dianna thought, cycling away, I’m pretty devastating in bed.

Walker Lee-Tembo occupied one of those underground pedigrees, known not at all to the general public – not, anyway, to Dianna’s parents – but known to a specialist group, its admirers and its acolytes. He probably wasn’t known, thought Dianna, but his distinctions are. And they probably aren’t even distinctions. Just offshoots of his glamour, and his glamour, which probably centred on nothing more than his smile, had carried him into many affections. Many people, by virtue of having imparted a kindness or admiration to him, thought they held rights to him. Now these people, drawn from the various stations of Walker’s life, manufacturers of his legend, readers of his single short book, saw their nurtured young man proposing an impossible match.

As for Walker, he was in one of the countries of his origin. Sky was higher there. Was all jets of sun and blue. One of those eight months to every year in which, definitely, weather reliably making decisions, coats and umbrellas were not needed.

The sky is black, thought Teresa, knowing that somehow her mother was counting stars, probably talking to them, reeling them through her vision like
cinéma verité.
The taxi was nearing Guangdung and the sky would soon be a lamp-lit haze. My brother wants to be black, thought Teresa, for the sake of one special conceit. He would like the contrast as he sits on the mythical white horse. Most of his time in the West he wore only black and white, a designer shirt and suit that limped. Even his walking stick, a gift of his African friends, was made from ebony and inlaid with ivory from, she was assured,
legitimately-culled
elephants. How brother could lean on that and, at the same time, advise CITES and other conservation groups on draft treaties and the like was beyond her. Only force of will had prevented him from strutting his stage with an elephant-skin briefcase, now, thankfully, consigned to a wardrobe. The contradictions of the brother – who imagined himself purely black or, in an occasional though gracious concession to genetics, half-black and half-Chinese. Parents were horrified by his aspiration, and the implication that they should have been black for him. As if being refugees and poverty-stricken was insufficient. But they dismissed it, after a suitable interval of horror, as they had learnt to dismiss most of his unconventional ways. What they did was to abstract from the list of his paradoxes, odd-ballisms and plain stupidities those romantic but reasonable touches that could embellish the telling of tales about offspring. Worked every time. Not one meeting of proud parents when mother and father could not trump all recitations of pride with a single note from their repertoire of son’s adventures under African skies. But he was never, in their stories, the black soul which, son felt, the African sun slowly but surely was drawing to his yellow-bleached surface.

Empress Wu of the Tang saw the bright lights of Guangdung. She was decreeing the demolition of all modern buildings, of all modernity. Teresa gently removed her wrists from the smudged taxi window. No more thunderbolts tonight, she smiled, and for the first time since it all began in White Stone, pulled her mother to her shoulder then
turned and held her and placed their foreheads together. The taxi driver, aware equally of the tumult recovery of the past can bring, and of the prospect of a large tip, began to sing and it was the music of the clouded spheres, and it was not the music of grand courts, it was the music of men who sing because people make light because the night is black. Those in love with the depths of darkness have lost souls.

In the years that came, it emerged that the cancer was not in his stomach but in his liver. By now, doctors were no longer evasive, they were brutally frank, and he had stormed out of the surgery vowing to live long enough to piss on the doctor’s grave. Even if he did not, he vowed to die with the same bravado that had always sallied from his lips and which had always grown in his heart – an organ he understood, for it partook in all his emotions, and was not the clogged and corroded parts that stomach and liver could only be, blind machines that sucked and cleaned. The heart was an eagle of the sky and led him on like a pulling string, and the eagle was red flame in the free daytime gods’ cup of blue. When a god finishes his drink, he thought, he turns over his cup, and a universe is created, from the soaring aspirations of freedom to the blind gropings of disease. The universe as tea leaves or coffee grounds sobered him. Not long to live, he thought, no pain as yet. He planned to let his eagle fly and be towed behind. When he died in flight, the true-heart eagle would cast his body in an arc towards the sun.

By the time second and third opinions were given (more diplomatically but still unevasively), tests completed, slivers of his liver analysed, scans examined, all while he was fully conscious and watching the television monitors, he was almost enjoying the process. It was a full New Zealand summer. Son was returning for Christmas and New Year, freer emotionally to visit after that first decade-absent return. Well, he hoped the news would not hinder son’s long hours in
the sun, still seeking to become brown, then char the brown to black. No ozone layer above New Zealand, he thought: must buy son a full stock of sunscreens. Slow down his sun-dyed project, but he would at least shine – body scars and all – in the long life-measuring days.

Ah, life-measuring days. Two to six months, the doctors had said. Extra maybe if the mind held out and ruled the body sufficiently. What was sufficiently? He read that meditation helped. Son would have to teach him how to meditate. He would have to learn to sit cross-legged on a cushion on his deck by the sea. His mind raced. I’ll stay in New Zealand. If I am still alive when summer ends, and if the pain has not yet come, I’ll follow the summer and I’ll see the antiquities of Europe and I’ll see in China that small place, Unused Sky, where I was born. I’ll not die under any winter’s mantle of grey.