The White Door (8 page)

This is how you passed by. Only in the repetition of dreams could you see a single cable in the sky. It grew across with not a pylon of
support. Half way between man and angel you sped across the sky, both arms holding fast to the pulley of a flying fox. If you lost your grip…

And you would, feet held forward, fly over acres and miles of the world of mud, and you flew urgently for the storm of the world’s end was massing out of your sight, far from the horizon to which you sped, but you knew the storm for this was the dream of destiny.

Even the people of the mud world did not want to die in the storm. You flew, the silent roar of terrible lives seeking to live.

Suddenly the dream pitches you there. The flying fox has gone. For the brief moment of futility you fly unaided. Against a grey tidal wave the size of a mountain you are the dreamt silhouette that flies sword in hand against the last wave of time and you are, forever, that man who came too late to save a single crab in his hopeless hole.

A month after the death of his father he sat in his Finnish room in Tampere, a distinguished visiting professor, and a full moon rose over the autumn mists, and the trees, becoming gold and red, dropped no more leaves, and he had mapped out the tattoo of the Red Emperor for his back, and the Finnish girl lay in his bed and almost a quarter century ago, as she was being born, and as the second moon girl in the throes of war in Bangladesh was being born, he was lamenting the loss of the first of their line, howling like the long-haired pelt-coated wolves of the Northern wastes, and he was – just as he was now one block away from the Lenin Museum – waving a flag and felt through the seams and stitching of his heart that all the East was red, so that in Tampere all those years later he resolved to write the chronicle of how he sought to lay the first girl of the moon on a flag of red by the green trees of Parnell and, as he made love to her there, was unknowing that amidst shell fire in one country and by the melancholy lakes of another the heartaches of his future were also being sired.

The first dream Anton had was to assassinate William Rogers. So, while the others nailed together their placards, filled their flour bombs, Anton spent first one week in the Hotel Intercontinental,
learning the mind and the view of a victim, calculating reverse trajectories from the bedroom below the one Rogers would occupy. Then he bought a telescopic sight for the .303 rifle he had resurrected from his late father’s wardrobe, having first cleaned the barrel and furniture-polished the stock. Fastidious, Anton; a new silk bandana, tea from a silver pot, the long-haired sniper who thought he might end a century of war, Sarajevo to Auckland, by a single bullet, start out with an archduke, clean up with a secretary of state. Even the New Zealand students knew Rogers was a dove in the US cabinet, but Anton wanted a symbol as much as he wanted a trophy, and he wanted a message that would retort around the world, bring comfort to his beloved Vietnamese, and harry the hawks who were already seeking a safe route out. No safe route, unless fast, was Anton’s simple message. In the Intercontinental, Anton viewed where the student protesters would gather. Flour bombs, he smiled to himself, they’ll bring flour bombs, maybe hit some policemen with their placards, and the police would form up flying wedges to dive amidst the crowd, like a kingfisher blue, to pluck from the shoals those ringleaders whose faces they had rehearsed from their briefing notes. Charge them with disorderly behaviour. The same ringleaders would plan to melt away into the university grounds around the Old Government House, confident the campus was sacrosanct and the police would stop at the gates as if a Geneva Convention ordered them. Olympian, Anton; smiled, said: no, this will be settled by a bullet to shock my little very little nation.

And where he proposed to dispatch that bullet was a first floor room in Old Government House, the first seat of, well, government in New Zealand – before it removed its posterior to windy Wellington, where the Cook Strait tempests would waft away its flatulence. Now a repository for bad colonial paintings, Kauri wood tables and very poor recent leather armchairs – filled by the local dons who had adopted the House as their student-excluded commons – there were still some deserted upstairs bedrooms and there Anton hid his polished rifle. As for the dons – fifth-raters, imposters, unpublished schoolmasters, thought Anton – they challenged not at all the tall, almost-completed
image of a Byronic figure who one day trooped upstairs, a golf bag slung over his frock-coated shoulder.

Across the lawns, across one road, a clear view of the Intercontinental. Between the lawns and the road, a picket fence and a hedge of bamboo. This sure isn’t Europe, thought Anton; but the hedge didn’t cloud at all his line of fire – upwards – to the suite above the room where he had stayed, and from where he had picked his present window, where he crouched and reversed his vision and adjusted his sights.

But the bamboo hedge was indispensable to the student leaders – their boundary against the police. Ever since some tenth-rate government spy had been caught on campus – an unfortunate named Godfrey, who had been planted by a spy-master named Gilbert, a brigadier who commanded the ten-strong force against creeping Communism – the students had declared the campus an autonomous republic, where the forces of authority could not enter, and the university Council had found a form of words which both understood the student position and did not defy the reach of the police. It was the police themselves who, by and large, respected the borders of the new republic, if only because crossing it cost more than it was worth, and the students, anyway, threw only flour – which, again anyway, always fell short of the only decent hotel in town, but could someone build another one soon, the police prayed, so they could occasionally chase back the shouting hordelets, Only limited sport at the Intercontinental. Only a single bullet, thought Anton. Hit or miss, he had his own escape route planned. The golf bag to be hurriedly transported to the roof of the nearby Biology building, hung from an improvised hook inside the first bend of a ventilation duct. Then he would walk back to the demonstration, taking a non-campus path along Symonds Street. Then he would throw flour bombs for all he was worth. Stephen would say he had been there all along, throwing for all he was worth indeed, though with a fastidious action, to keep spillage away from his lovely coat.

Stephen had demurred at his plans. William Rogers is a trapped dove, he said, but a strategically-placed one. The cause needs Rogers
alive, alive but frightened perhaps. Could you not arrange merely a near-miss? But he knew Anton’s vanity and vision could not retreat from the formula he had concocted, then brazenly announced, at the Parnell house hung with signs that declared it the People’s Republic of Gibraltar Crescent, hung also with Vietnamese and Chinese flags – just in case Brigadier Gilbert’s remaining nine minions were slow of reading. Beyond the house, in which disastrous parties, seeking an improbable alliance between radical students and Hell’s Angels, had resulted in almost no functioning furniture, there was the great bank of trees, and that was the Domain, and birds sang each morning for the radicalised and unradicalised alike, for those with frock coats and silk bandanas and those without, and sun would filter through the trees onto the tracks they called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which led the brave souls of the new revolution on time to their lectures from their unpublished dons. And Stephen had thrown up his hands in horror, but made no moral objection, only a strategic one, but what Stephen knew of strategy could be written on the fingernail of the Girl of the Moon, with whom he lay on the lawns of Old Government House and, each day, the professor of English, white goatee combed, would pass by and wish the young lovers well, and an entire autumn had passed like that, but now it was winter, and the trapped dove of war was encamped in the great hotel across the road, and Anton slid the rifle away behind a velvet curtain and walked out fingering the single bullet he now carried always in the cigarette case in his pocket in his dark crimson coat.

Almost two decades later, his hair moderately shortened for the sake of a father he had not seen for ten years of self-imposed exile in the cathedral streets of Europe and the war-torn fields of Africa, Stephen would marry his second wife on the lawns, by the roses, at the Kauri tables of Old Government House, seeking a domestic end to the traumas of being unable to have the second girl of the moon, whom he had left as a hidden romance on the sun-drenched plains, thinking of how she had been born on a refugees’ trek from the trail of war – the peasant women kindly helping deliver her by a river, taking pity on her well-born mother – and thinking not at
all of Anton, William Rogers, or the local professors whose stars his own was rapidly eclipsing. Thinking not yet of years ahead, when the incorrigible moon would strike again, while at the same time a black hand would smother his eaten father.

Two day before the arrival of William Rogers, the police removed the rifle from behind the velvet curtain. No bullet being in it, they thought it merely misplaced property, and thought not at all of Anton’s thunder among the students who imposed solidarity with the bombed villages of a far away land.

Anton’s second dream, composed again of charade and determination, had been to hijack all television broadcasting over Auckland. High in the Waitakare mountains, standing out in the fern forests, was a gigantic television mast. In Shortland Street, in metropolitan Auckland (although Anton would never have used that term), programmes were beamed first to the Waitakare’s mast and, thence, to all the isthmus on which Auckland, sparkling-harboured, first sat then sprawled. Winding through the fern forest was a single road called, in that direct New Zealandese, the Scenic Route. Somehow, Anton had discovered a small monitoring station was attached to the mast and, within it, stood means to override Shortland Street but, for want of anything to override – for want of decent programmes to monitor, said Anton – it was mostly unmanned. So, Anton’s second dream had been to storm the monitoring station, override the broadcast, and leave hanging on every screen between the two harbours a placard – he had already prepared the slide – which denounced the war and promised victory for the Vietnamese. To have it linger there, two trusty bands of aides would fell trees across the Scenic Route, both at its start and its end, so police could not easily reach the station – he had already acquired the dynamite for the trees, he said. And when Stephen said, why blow up trees, why not simply crater the road?, he shrugged his shoulders in mock despair. But he had again worked out his escape route – by bicycle – to Kare Kare beach; and when someone else pointed out the road to Kare Kare had not been graded for some time and was
a corrugated heap of unlit gravel, rather unsuitable for bicycles at night, he shrugged again. And how would the two teams of explosives personnel escape, huh? But Anton had a plan for them too, so the maps were brought out, and the hapless trees selected and the teams chosen – Stephen in charge of the one near Titrangi – and compromise refuges for everyone found in Laingholm and Helensville, and Anton promised to hand out the detonators on the morning of the mission, having already issued the dynamite and, of course, he carried the detonators in his cigarette case, and Geoff said if they went off over his heart Anton would live on, not having a heart of any sort, and everyone laughed. But, on the morning of the mission it rained heavily and continued into the afternoon, and Anton never appeared to issue the two detonators, so Geoff surmised Anton had not wished to dampen his coat, and everybody went to the Kiwi Tavern near the university and, when Anton was seen some days later, he said nothing of televisions and Geoff and Stephen said nothing too.

The third dream of Anton saw his return, as he called it, to Leipzig; only he had never been to Leipzig, except of course in his repeated dream, and in his ancestry – the grandchild of refugees from Germany, not Hitler’s but the Kaiser’s, of a minor count who had opposed war, had dropped the ‘von’, and come circuitously to, alas of all uncultured places, New Zealand; and his reduced descendants came eventually to a government housing estate, carved from stolen Maori land, overlooking a great bay, and Anton had looked at sparkling waters, bypassed Rangitoto in his line of vision, and thought only of lands escaping him. Those runaway lands in his hawk’s vision stopped at last in Leipzig, preserved in his dream’s eye as the courteous town of an ideal philosophy – before factories, Kaisers and Hitlers – and the site of a great European university. It was now called Karl Marx University, but the ancient core remained and, for Anton, it was the siren Oxford of his dreams, the antithesis of all New Zealand provided him. Often, overlooking Mission Bay, hair and coat blowing like Byron’s Manfred, he thought of Stephen, whose coat and hair
alone blew like his; but Stephen, was setting about forgetting his past, becoming European in the New Zealand mould, but Stephen did not know Europe in his bones and Anton did; and what Stephen was forgetting was war and a very great nation grown decadent with poverty, its philosophy lost amidst terrors and subjugations, but what Anton remembered was a philosophy that said ‘Rise above the worlds, there is an essence to things, and there is no thing in itself.’ The image of a distant essence hung over him like his dream but, in New Zealand, essence was trapped in a sheep-farmer’s concrete and only chipped for at an ersatz gothic-towered imitation university bordered by an earnest deep green bamboo hedge.

When your blue flash of a chance arrives and, to make your bravado credible, you need to jump those chasms of risk in full public view and perform with the grace and calm of your cool image, and do it also for your image of yourself, then you imperceptibly suck in air and do it. Three times Anton did it and two times success rolled leerily and coolly in his strutting wake.

The first time was in Parnell and, since it was 1969 and since it was New Zealand – naïve enough to send troops to Vietnam, Anton said, and naïve enough to list its security headquarters in the phone book – Anton simply cased out Brigadier Gilbert’s Auckland base and one moonlit night (he had waited for the full moon), he simply broke into it, walked through it as alarms rang, and walked out the back door as police arrived at the gate. The telephone-tapping equipment he gathered up on his walk through he put inside his leather briefcase, and he sheltered that night in the house of a nearby painter. And the whole thing was executed neatly since Stephen, in the telephone box half a street away, had telephoned security headquarters as soon as he heard sirens, and Anton took the ringing tones as the prearranged signal and flounced happily towards the back door. The next night,
when he emerged from his shelter, he walked two hours to Bastion Point and, on Maori land above Mission Bay, he scattered the arcane bits and pieces of his booty and sang like a condemned man who had earned his reprieve.