The White Door (7 page)

And, as the sun shone fitfully through Heaven’s Cloud, and the boy
danced from grave to grave, singing some nonsense to himself, the others began the memorial picnic, offering first the roasted meats to his grandmother, and then looked around for the first-born son in his brown beret, and almost rushed to stop him, but withdrew to watch, as he had found a grave unloved by flowers, unvisited by picnicking loved-ones, and the son was walking a circumference he had plotted in that mind of children who know circles, and he was, like the socialist commissar of the graves, collecting a single flower from each grave and, a sufficient bouquet collected by circle’s end, brought them to the grave unloved and placed them in the headstone’s vase with such a studied tenderness that all the prophecies that had been intoned at his birth sprang to the parents’ minds, the child of flowers who would limp in a muddied world of black people and wave a centuries-old sword of fire beneath the moon and the black soil of heaven’s garden of stars.

And had sought, before he was theirs, to wear sky in his hair, and had been returned, a refugee’s son, to relearn the limits of life and of grace, and to give up his heart to the creatures of heaven.

Because he was proud and had grown weary of the slights of his parents, particularly his dragon mother and, anyway, the bands of stomach muscles could not constrict the black hand, and the timetable of the hand gave him ambition, because the timetable might be short and he had to hurry and he wanted to look back on this time of life with contempt, and because he had fallen in love with Meil Wah, he was indignant with himself that he could not prevent his wife from being subjected to the indignities, commands and deprivations his dragon mother had first dealt out to him.

But there was nothing he could do. They were poor. They lived in the shop with his parents. His wife had come without dowry and she redeemed this lack by accepting the home and the hegemony
of the dragon. And if, in the stories, most dragons were the benign angels of God, messengers of glad tidings and playful in the heavens like dolphins, this mother-in-law she thought was the unlovely rogue of the skies who had been beached in the tree-fringed backwater of Parnell, and had the temper and scorn of an excluded creature, but her China of old, of warlords and slaves, was changing even then. The sickly mother of Meil Wah had died and her father with the heart of adventure before her and Meil Wah had accepted, because there was no choice, the marriage brokered around her, and the husband-to-be, she thought, could be loved, or something comfortable that usually grew in the wake of love might grow, even if love never did; but the in-laws were the hefty conditionals of the protocol she was imagining. That was in 1948, and in 1949 the Red Star Brigades swept China, and it seemed like marriage in Parnell forever, in the shop at the end of the world and, in that tumultuous year, born under that star of tumult, came the son bruised black from her two days of labour, the long slippery savage of her womb, and his hair was long at birth, and she loved him like a sole gift.

He was put, first in a pram, then a pushchair, tethered to a pillar near the double doors of the shop and, as his parents worked, he would silently, never crying, examine the world of trams, children in uniform returning from school, and an unfinished cathedral that shared, with the shop, the apex of a hill, and the sun set like a ball of fire at the horizon that stretched flat from the foot of the hill.

Tethered, he became the centre of attention, and a loving conspiracy. His first motor actions were to learn to shell the small and tender peas, since he was always parked by the bin of peas, eat the peas, replace the empty husks. For weeks, the customers happily bought the husks of peas and only when a stranger complained did the regulars laughingly confess that they had watched delighted at the child’s delicate skill and sought no end to the opera of his fingers.

But the grandfather, in order to chasten the child, would wait till night, when the family had eaten, and creep outside, and his hand
would appear in the window shaking keys and intoning wrath, and the grandmother would say, ‘key key soll will come and get you’, soll being the Chinese word for ‘hand’, so the monster outside the window was clearly a hybrid, and he cared not for the efforts of grandfather hand, ate peas from time to time, and listened to his heart beat late at night to avoid the whine of lovelorn music, like his father husbanded the insults borne by his mother, and, although he sat on the grandmother’s lap and heard the tales of heroes, waited for night when the heart beat like the heavy march of his army.

Tethered, he watched children return from school. He watched his father work. And life was a shuttle before his eyes and shuttle behind and beside him, and he knew his father hoarded his meagre wages for a shop of his own and he knew the shuttle would be more frenetic, even more urgent then, and pride and richness would make the father love his shop as he already loved his dream of it. And the child thought of schooling and of the white tower; he wanted to own the tower so that, somehow, he would learn its secret; and he measured out the days of school until in his mind he reached the tower; and he knew, one day, though sick and wrapped in a shadow, his father would insist upon entering his shop, for the last day at the last shop, and serving a magically-coloured stone to a customer, would turn from the green emeralds and look at the sapphire dome of the sky.

Years later, in the last days of illness, the Patient Heart sent again the white horse. He did it like this: sitting in meditation posture, facing his garden through the French doors, facing an English summer that was as yet still green and the roses climbed, and the ash trees rose over all. The walled garden of the English dream, although he’d been trying to sell this dream for a year, ever since his wife, Penny, had left and the moon girl, Marja, had spent too little time with him there. Yet,
exactly there, where the sun came through the French doors, entered from the garden exactly framed, he had made love many times to Marja, and she did not fly off to the moon, and he felt very briefly a normal scholar amidst his books and paintings, and the outside world was ordered though luxuriant, and the outside world met the inside world in a shaft of sunlight on the carpet where the girl of his dreams lay for him and the high birds watched.

Now he knelt there, loosening his knees for the lotus to come, regularising and sinking his breath. And in the weeks just past it had snowed on him in Johannesburg and he had shivered sleeplessly on the high veld nights, it had shone reliably on him in Durban, and it had rained reliably on him in Cape Town, and by day he had been the designer-suited lecturer of authority – cited by many South African PhDs – and by night he had been the white-suited karate master, the long-haired magazine cover made flesh. The effort of switching identities smoothly made him stand up one winter’s day in Johannesburg, then faint, and when he came to he was soaked in the coldest sweat he could remember, having fallen well even though unconscious. Now he was sinking his breath, he had completed some hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups for the sake of his father’s sight of him, and had tied the hair in the glossy tail of the dream heroes, and he was naked facing his summer-lit garden, and on the other side of the world it was night and a life was coming to its end, and he had read how hard it is for souls to escape the body’s fitful ways of dying. Those shot in war, as he had seen, had an easier time of it than those in the last bed of their lives. So he was preparing now, the soul-master who had jumped several lessons in the lexicon on meditation, out of grief, love, and because he knew he could do it, the crippled
soul-master
of the Kentish walled garden, to escort his father across the bridge of life and to say farewells to him on the edge of the
honey-rich
plain where, as his father’s father had said before him on his own deathbed, the souls of the dead begin their journeys to heaven, where they are embalmed in the new bodies of their next lives. And the Patient Heart, a.k.a. the White Warrior, knelt somewhere in summer Kent and some part of that well-trained heart of his was bitter like
unsmoothed gravel and yet he had, in order to do what he proposed to do, to take out the heart’s rake and soothe the gravel into the tall roses and the green chamber of a garden like the one that faced him, to make heart and garden one, so his soul could fly in the summer blue and cross the bridge of the world and take his father’s hand on that walk across the bridge of life, and the neighbours heard the first great sigh breathe out from the garden since a beautiful Finnish girl had lain briefly there, but this sigh, measuring itself away from bitterness, was of the resignation a warrior feels when he stands amidst the last hundred of his fallen companions and wraps some dreamt-of Roman commander in his final red and red-stained cloak.

Because when he had left for his five-week tour of southern Africa his father had sounded strong – for the brief sentences he voiced on the telephone – but when he returned the voice was pathetically weak and limited to a lone sentence, and even his mother, topping and tailing the father’s words as usual, no longer concealed the gravity of his sudden decline. And the son knew even before he phoned since, on his return, he found the plaque his father had given him fallen,
face-down
on the floor and, the next day, visiting his office, every one of his paintings hung limply on the walls with broken cords. And, he said to himself, he may have been misreading the signs of late, for a full year in fact when it came to the Finnish girl, but there was no doubt someone was sending him signs, and their range of reading was, he thought, sucking in breath, bitterly narrow and he exhaled the taste of it in a bubble over the grubby complex of the LSE and it pulsated like a child’s blown bubble, a child’s breath, over the thunder of Aldwych and Holborn, and became one with the exhaust of one thousand
slow-moving
summer cars.

And this was how he did it on that Saturday afternoon before his garden, having composed himself and entered himself and summoned the White Warrior and made him pristine and sent him off around the world. It was hard to reach the other side, it was hard to reach
the father, harder still to enter him, and he could not construct the necessary narrative, and in Kent his injured knees were hurting and when he finally entered the father, he could only play three images and he played them over and over and they intercut and he thought these were the last strobe-light visions of his father, the living linking parts were being excised.

1. He saw the White Warrior face-to-face with his father. The father’s back was to his camera and the shot was framed from the upper back rising, and the father had in his soul not lost weight and was the hearty father of his memory and the Warrior was looking into that part where his father’s eyes would have faced him and they could not yet have been death eyes for the Warrior was speaking to him with his eyes and the two men would bring their right forearms together over and over and, in Kent, he was thinking ‘this is the edge of the honey plain, but the Warrior cannot cross to this side of the bridge,’ but it was not the honey plain, merely its precursor as the dying soul imagines where it is shortly to go.

2. The camera has moved back now. We see more of the precursor plain. The warrior son is bowing and sweeping his arm – strange, it is his useless left arm – in the direction of an unseen bridge. Then the image cuts and plays again, then cuts again, then the two men are in close-up once more reading words in each other’s eyes and making arms clash in that futile last gesture that says love has the strength of well bodies. It is a muscular farewell, the poetry is what they say with their eyes and the camera cannot record something so reserved.

3. The son holds the reins of the white horse. When he strokes its nuzzle, reins disappear. In the mouth of the last blue cavern of life’s fountain, they are standing. There is an upwards curving hewn-stone bridge across a chasm in the stars and some full moon is in the great heaven, and the bridge leads to a small land of stone and from there the bridges lead across the outcrops of the honey plain until they come to the well-lit sunlit plain itself. The image of the moon and the mouth of the last cavern and the white horse plays over and over. In Kent, the Patient Heart embraces summer air the shape of his father. In the long cloud-strewn islands of the south the father, back still to the
camera, faces the White Warrior who gestures towards the horse and the white horse by the white moon walks slowly towards the bridge and if you walk behind, no longer turning towards the Warrior who cannot cross with you, you can do it smoothly and death will not rattle in your throat because air and soul have escaped clean.

Back in Kent he comes to. He is shaking. He does not know if ever the white horse can return to him, and how can a soul fight if it cannot ride? He makes tea and it shakes in his hand and he is crying now and the sun is shining on the Downs and the five ports, and wind stirs the ash trees but no wind enters the walled garden, but it makes him look up. On his wall, holding his wide belt of office, bearded, not thin at all, is the Red Emperor, and he looks like his father and also like the emperors in all his grandmother’s fairy tales and, as he watches, the Red Emperor slowly rises into the sky and, looking down at him always, takes half an hour to disappear like a kite released by the heart towards the sun.

There was a mud world. Wound sleepless in sheets, five years of age, the master of speech and two words in English, and for five years to come, he had every night the same dream.

There was a mud world, flat under grey skies, a land of neither blue nor green, but brown, grey. Irrigation canals kept the mud what it was destined always to be, mud; and if a man of the living world, or even an angel of heaven stood upon the mud he would sink. But there were people of the mud world who begged release from passers-by. If you passed by, arms would plead and eyes would plead and mouths, encaked, would seek to plead. There was no sound in the mud world.