Authors: Stephen Chan
It was still an infant country. By that he meant it was still learning regard for its own people. It would become a teenage country when it learnt regard for the world of people beyond its shores. For now, they were runaway lands and the work of reanchoring only one land, after the Maori titan, Maui, dragged it from the deep, was still folkloric, still inventing its myths of itself and its people. In 1970, Stephen became media adviser to all three new groups to do with women’s liberation, gay liberation, and Nga Tamatoa, the Young Warriors of Maori liberation – despite being neither female, gay nor Maori. Anton had removed himself to Tasmania, with his silver tea set. Ah well, thought Stephen, a very little nearer Leipzig. But Stephen would have supported any group seeking to be free, rather seeking to reinvent itself beyond persecution, to build itself an identity from which it could fight back. But the process of reinvention and invention troubled him. Where is the universe? He thought. Each ideology was built upon the purity of its protagonists – nothing wrong with that. But it was as if, under Heaven’s Cloud alone, the pure and its reverse decor, the impure, fought on the wave-washed shorelines. Thus, the universe was condensed to a struggle between gays and straights, women and men, Maori and Pakehas. There was little enough original in that. Through – of all things – rugby, it had always been New Zealand against the world. And that was the problem: the outside world was what was squashed at rugby. The new liberations would take years to
develop more refined and complex senses of that great other, outside New Zealand. When the war between Maori and Pakeha ended, where in the Maorified cosmology lay everything else? If Maoridom began to define itself on that which was not Pakeha, there was an awful lot out there that was otherwise not Pakeha – not the colonial derivation and maladjustment of European, but European, not pure and simple, but multifarious and complex, based on anchored myth millennia-old, reinventing itself on the basis of fluid oppositions or no oppositions at all. And there was the world of Africa, and fifty recently liberated causes for reinvention and membership of the world; India, and the archer-ghost, Arjuna, casting his magic arrows that caused thunderstorms on impact, something so old it had travelled Elizabeth’s loop of time from now to then and back to now again; and there was China – of which he had received and rejected a predigested, highly selective and asinine sliver of a momentous whole.
But it was China that now began its re-invasion of his life: the China that supported the Vietnamese, the China that trained the Zimbabweans – so that, years later, he would meet Shona officers and settle down to eat with them, all using chopsticks like a natural and indispensible part of their hitherto separated lives.
He had tried to learn from Elizabeth and had abandoned his straight lines, had taken up a view of the dialectic as rolling thunder (an image he regretted when the Americans adopted the term for one of their great offensives in Vietnam), but its sense was adequate enough: history as whirlwind, and it swirled and turned now, doubling back on himself, towards the red east. One night, at the university’s Lower Lecture Theatre, under the fake gothic tower, seated alongside the bombers of the Supreme Court doors, he watched the propaganda film of all time – three hours long and composed only of primary colours. The east was not mauve or lilac, nor aqua, nor brown or grey. The east was indisputably red and defined itself in choruses sung by regiments of Chinese girls wearing primary-coloured blusher, against a sky that was cloudless in its blue intensity and, when the sun grew marginally too hot, a giant canopy from heaven, a red flag, would descend, wave, and shelter the sweltering, sweating, precision-drilled masses, whose
make-up never streaked and whose hope never faltered, and whose identity, born of revolution, was sure. And it was pure in itself. It was its own essence. He was amazed. All around him, in the
standing-room-only
crowd, young men in frock coats and young women in frock coats wept for a myth too powerful and pure for any one or all of them.
This was not the world, thought Stephen, but it was more of the world than he held in his wife-lost hands. Five years later, he would leave New Zealand forever, and he spent that half decade rehearsing departure. The world cannot be taken by storm. He would take Tiger Mountain by strategy. Somewhere, under some moon, would be a waiting White-Haired Girl. Leaving was a dance into the true time of the universe, and, out there, he would find a true colour by which he might immerse his growing, unwatered life.
A month after his father’s death, all this returned to him by the lakes and trees of Finland. Autumn – soon the girl would enter the perpetual night of the northern winter. At least where she lived now was marginally lighter than the borderlands of her birth, Archangel Karelia, to where her family fled before the Soviet advance. Each the first-born of refugee families, and each missing the other in the way whole cultures are missed by a single step across a distant frontier. It was a brief return. He recognised the process and the women now, but still sought – as he had in Parnell – to hold what cannot be held. But he thought of the Kalavela, the assemblage of folksong that now passed as Finland’s national epic – its
Illiad
, Shakespeare, Milton and, above all, its rival to Pushkin, all in one six hundred-page volume – collected, some say concocted, to help the people growing, no longer a Swedish colony or a Russian duchy, though its capital, Helsinki, was beautiful like a miniature St Petersburg. How like Auckland, with its imitation Sydney, thought Stephen. For each, there is an Other, the model that dares not speak its name, and the myths are invented to prove the miniature is all the world.
But he loved the girl. Of all the women in his life, moon girls or
others, he had never loved one so anxiously. In the assembled epic, Vainaimoenem, Ilmarinen and Lemikainen liberate the sun from its winter prison. They find it clothed in a stone mountain. There, the moon and stars are also imprisoned. And who were the liberators? A singer of songs, a blacksmith who made golden women, a playboy loyal most of all to his mother. Each sought by turns the Maid of Northland, of the snow citadels, of the Arctic sweeps. None won for long the maid, but they freed the sun and moon, and set them in the skies, one for summer never setting, and one for winter. It is beautiful in winter, she said. It is not black, as it was when the three set out to find the creatures of heaven. In winter, when the moon shines, the snow all around me, as far as my eyes can see, is deepest blue. Sweet summer husband, I am free in the blue caverns of a long, myth-laden dream. Sleep now. The Lenin Museum has closed its doors.
At a time when even the Patient Heart remembered the White Warrior only as a mythology, news came when he was in Belfast at the height of the marching season that his mother had not one but three inoperable brain tumours. Never an exit by halves, he thought, pouring scorn and imagining he was urinating on the Orangemen far below. She, meanwhile, was demanding parties and organising a festival for the ward. You’re her son ringing from where? said the duty sister. Oh yes, please speak to her. So it was that the Patient Heart, both parents lost and being lost to cancer, imagining ways to lift a crystal wine glass of liquid morphine, resolved to write the revisionist history of all time, and celebrate his mother, the reincarnated Empress Wu, who even now wreaked mayhem in an Auckland ward and reduced the training of a battalion of nurses to wind-tossed confetti.
But first he found himself recreating the film he had seen, a son lifting up his dying mother. The house overlooks an estuary and within it, none of his father’s souvenirs and whimsical collections had migrated towards the door. Edge of bank: water lapping a rock wall. One long step from the wall there is a tiny island. They called it Little Toto after the grand Rangitoto in the sparkling harbour of Auckland.
Silver sails around Rangitoto. Ducks and seabirds, a heron, sit on Little Toto. It is her favourite island. The heron loves her. She knows each duck is a philosopher. They are called, she says, Parmenides, Euclid, and Aristotle. The heron is unnamed. Looks at her sideways on, recognition winning over caution, until one day, amazingly, it came up to her and just stood by her. A messenger from the sky, she thought, and one whose silence invited you to compose a message to yourself, a scenario, and in the scenario her son had landed from the same sky and was lifting her in his arms and all the estuary water shone like the golden plains of Heaven.
It was the plains now to which she was headed. There, in an exact gap in the clouds, was where an emperor’s soul had escaped clean. Just like that – even while she was cradling his body. The souls just shoot out, she thought, but then the resonance of their escapes, the particles they leave behind, remember wife and family and recompose themselves as a spirit of the estuary. Further to the right, above the headland, she had once imagined a pale prince and a flame duke duelling in the sky. The sunsets over Little Toto were bonfire beacons, lighting a way. She knew the way, she knew the way. She knew that even as the body slowly slackened and wasted, something was winding inside her, tight, a catapult aimed at a crevice of cloud. One day, perhaps before the year was out, a cancer cell would finish gnawing its way through that last, tight rope of time. Did the son, holding her, lifting her in his imagination, all those continents away, know how rudimentary were the mechanics of time? So simple, my little Parmenides, so washed by this gorgeous sun.
He had gotten it wrong. It was winter, no colder than a London autumn, but the light was wrong, the trees were wrong, his fingernails had grown on the flight over. Over what? It was a long night, and summer had slipped its light into the dawn’s grey, and the cloud of
Heaven was a mist over a silver, silver estuary.
Do you ever think of the time you shouldered a gun for Garang, those nights we walk in great cities? London? Vienna? I include Asmara, prize of the great campaign. You fantasised you could take Juba just like that? Ah, Cirino, and it is always wet: we, you and I, dodging puddles, cut on wine, discussing laughter and death, always death; our genealogies, like the litany of our scriptures, is always of the unseen cousin. Only you have seen a lot more of him. The thunder flashes of battle. Between them there is only the straining for sound. You are deafened. You are trying to hear how close the tumbling cups of death are sloshing their liquefying business by your accepting but terrified ears. Not afraid. You’re never afraid. You’d just like to know when. Even when the shellburst illuminates your face, it is merely pondering how small a word can make death as calm as… well, Vienna. When. If we knew, we could… What? Die happy? Die prepared. Do it with more than a nanosecond’s respect for a life you lived with integrity and resignation.
We discuss these things by hand signs, by gestures and eye flickers, one winter’s night in Covent Garden. The others in the party are young in experience. They want the wine’s glow under the brazier at my favourite streetside table. Summer or winter, I am seated there. You know where to find me. The fingers drum out the gunfire. The piazza is full of bodies. No one sees them. It is full of bodies. Where I sit, the table, is a convergent point. Battles come here and sit in the piazza. I think about the battles of the world, Cirino; about you trudging the Sudanese sands, an AK across your shoulder; how they decided there was learning in you and sent you to a monastery school and, by and by, cobbled scholarships later, you are in England. But I
see gunfire in your eyes. I see the way you listen – peripheral hearing, a fox turning its ears for the sounds bouncing off cobblestones. The waist is thicker now; they taught you about wine in the monastery; but ready, in an instant, to swivel – body drop and flatten. The waist, Cirino, I saw from the waist first, then the ears and eyes, that you had been a fighter. No one else knows. My friends lead too polite and
well-washed
lives to need to know. You’re just the refugee scholar in the check suits. Let them adopt you like that. Let them not know how like wine on hands it all is, this business.
And we couldn’t talk either, that night riding back on a slow train from Canterbury. You, freshly made a doctor of philosophy. I’d watched you nervously waiting your turn in the cathedral cloisters, the scarlet facings of your gown in the shadow. Then you emerged briefly into the light mediated by the stained glass. Scarlet and black – your colours, my colours since youth. You wave a red flag against the night? Of course. It is the only thing to do against the night. There is nothing the New Labour politicians understand of this. We tried to speak of this on the train – ridiculous politicians, I mean, not cousins or business – both accompanied by partners we would later give up, or try to give up, as death washed over our middle age, left its wrinkly scars, foreheads marked for a distant but rapidly closing-sniper. He takes those near you, one by one, you’re just listening as it happens, before the rifle turns (you hear its swivel) towards you in a train, you in a piazza, me in a piazza. The wine glass shatters. How glad it was the glass. We look up at the same instant – a reverie, we come out of a reverie – the train is crossing the Thames: there’s the Albert Bridge to our left, with all its lights; there’s the high water; can’t see the moon; the station swallows us. When shall we see each other again?
And shall it be like that night in Asmara? Wet. You navigated me, eyesight always better, around the filled potholes, walking back from God knows where – where the common people eat and drink, you said (and get drunk, I said later) – and taking a cool two hours to do it, stumbling (no, only I stumbled) until we gratefully encountered the paved sidewalks of the inner city. My mother is very ill, I said, probably a cancer in the colon, and they should be operating even as
we walk. ‘These are the streets,’ you said, ‘down which the victorious Eritrean army walked, amazed they had done it. The Soviet officers and Ethiopian soldiers just evacuated to Addis. They didn’t try to hold. But they took all the university’s library books with them. In Mozambique, the departing settlers smashed all the flushing toilets. Here, they knew in a more refined way how to slow the birth of a new country. Stephen, how many books have you dedicated to your mother? She is dreaming of them now. Even as she lies there, the scalpels busy, that part that rises above keeps one eye on the surgeons and the other in the great unlooted library of her memory. She will live and grow better for you. She is remembering you. A refugee child? She was well seated with us, all eating with our fingers, in that humble café in the slums. Don’t you know I could see by the way you lifted your food, raised your wine glass, that you were offering everything before it touched your lips? Me a fighter? You’re a priest. Before we part on this street corner – your hotel’s over there – let us pray for your mother that, for this time at least, the love that comes from memory will flood away the impediments to the future.’
Cirino, I said, the last time I was in Asmara, my father was dying. I wrote about what I would do, I wrote it in this very city, how I would send a White Warrior to carry him easily to his new world. ‘Stephen, I think you will not do this again from Asmara. You will be with her perhaps. Afterwards, you will write about it. What will the metaphor be? The White Warrior again? The sword-bearing brothers duelling in the sky? Before you write, I shall put my arm around you, catch you in some city, somewhere. Be strong. I do not think your mother will die tonight. But, even though it is you who are the failed priest, it is I who have been around them more recently. Let me lead the prayer.’
Thus it was we found ourselves walking in Vienna. The gold leaf adorning St Stephen’s did not look ironic, merely tasteless. I even think Klimt is tasteless. Actually, I thought everything was tasteless, including the too-clean streets, the non-predatory men in the gay bar we accidentally entered, the concrete University of Economics where
we presented papers, well, you name it, red-eyed and sleepless, I probably loathed it. Only Wittgenstein’s café, where I tried every table on the premise he must have sat there once (or twice, or a hundred times), did I like. I hated the waiters. I think they hated us. There’s still a whiff of racism in the manners of that town. Well, it was just too orderly! Even the monument to the Holocaust victims was desecrated by cleanliness – as if nobody shat themselves in fear as they were (in an orderly fashion) marshalled onto the last train carriages of their lives. And the students in period costume, selling tickets to Mozart concerts… the town hated Mozart. I hate Mozart too: all those neat little melodies when he was, apparently, a coprophiliac little (shit?) (turd?) anally unretentive currier of favours.
I make myself clear? You, of course, were subtlety itself. (How do you do it in those check suits?) Didn’t ask for details. Couldn’t tell you anyway of those long nights in the New Zealand hospital watching it do its horrible business to her. Couldn’t manage it. But you just said one day, looking serenely ahead, as we passed Olbrich’s Secession Building, its gold cabbage dome covered by scaffolding, the only building in Vienna I had wanted to see, me building up to another lecture on obscure art history, very meaningful when you’re marching in a desert, ‘Stephen, I remember when your mother last came to England. You were walking the Kent campus, arm-in-arm. I cycled behind you, smiling. Then rang my bell just close enough to make her jump.’ That was it. That was all you said. We entered the town centre, declining to queue for opera tickets, and I was smiling at the memory of your bell.
There was a bell clear as light in Croatia. It seems to me I felt briefly young. All that blue sky and water in a life made too complex by a choice of living. It was a choice – who could deny it now? Mount an ox and renounce the world? That’s a choice. Mount a white horse
instead, let a sword grow in your hand and make a curtain of your hair? That’s a choice. But it leads to the same spiritual growth as the shaven-headed monk. One’s merely more placid with himself but, under Heaven, there is only endless tumult. What do you want it to be? The space between the stars or the storm-tossed fire of a growing star? Blue fire. It seemed to me once, when I was very young, that the flash of blue fire was all there was. You make a choice. You leap. High wire, high wire… if you connect to the wire… you can go. You can see the universe made into a metaphor for your limitation. You can see the end of time. How, as a child, a mere child, beset by dreams, hair always too long, do you make such a choice?
Dreams are the key. The true world is there. There was a film once: the blind samurai. If he had eyes, then, by his posture, he would see only moss on the ground. It was as if he looked for moss on the ground. His hair fell over his face. He didn’t need to comb it back. He and the child he has rescued are surrounded. He says to the child that he must cover his eyes, not see the slaughtering defence about to begin. But he cannot see it either. The enemies advance, unseen. Does he hear them? Smell them? Somehow sense them? It will be too late if he waits until he can touch them. No, he has dreamt them. The sword leaves its scabbard. The sword at least sees. But it doesn’t leave its scabbard until the foemen are within their dreamt-of range, at their dreamt-of positions. The sword sees them. It leaves the scabbard like a mask falling from its eyes. The line is unbroken. The sword cuts in an endless curve. The line has no punctuation, is not conjugated, is not decline, it is the line of swords who do what good swords do, cutting beautifully. The child cannot keep his eyes shut. He sees the last scything eight. The sword resumes the mask. Everyone but a blind man and a child are dead.
It is night-time in Croatia. There are drinks by the harbour. Ciril is ordering giant prawns. Two academicians of the fine arts academy of Slovenia are sitting at our table. I am drunk and wondering how few prawns I can eat to suggest I am grateful, and whether the artists have a theory of colour: how one might live a life in blacks and reds because one has a longing for something so blue that a sword aches
in the hands. It aches, this 400-year-old sword that reached out to me in the Canterbury street one day, made me go in, search out the source of compulsion that dragged me to its shadowy corner, made me go home, apologetic to Penny, showing her the sword, yet another errand to buy a computer aborted.
I remembered the rock ledges of Croatia, the sea leaching colour from the sky until it appeared through my sunglasses like sapphire. You couldn’t keep it out. Pine trees fringed the bay. The spirit of my father danced between sky and water. I would rise, I would always rise to greet him.