The White Door (14 page)

They were old. Of course, he was old, but something about the New Zealand sun deepened the lines. All around him, age sat. He sat himself in age. He had to abandon his European-ness. Lines, no matter how gained, were lines. No one else had had his adventures. He had to abandon his Chinese-ness. No one else had stormed the portals of Heaven. But everyone had stormed an American Consulate one autumn day. There was the woman whom Judith Todd recalled to him in Zimbabwe. He had to abandon his African-ness. He was back home. There was the man with the silver tongue, who had addressed the crowds at Albert Park, and who had owned a great dog. There were the bombers of the Supreme Court doors. He had to abandon the dream of his sword. Everybody had grown into a pacifism. Everybody decried the American bombs over Belgrade. He had to abandon his sense of time. The rhetoric and method of argument were just the same. The world out there, beyond the great harbours, was just the same. They looked at him. How naked he had to become to become just the same. Anton was not there. He could figleaf in honour of Anton. But Geoff, seeing his confusion, came to his rescue. ‘Stephen was always the most philosophical and gentle of us. Remember, at the sit-in, he carried a red rose.’ Stephen did not recall it as a rose. Probably Geoff didn’t either. Geoff’s easy elegance covered Stephen. The children looked at him. For thirty years, their parents had just dreamed he still existed. No one had read his writings. But the dreams had kept him alive. Now, here he was, the body so mortified by the extremes of his training and adventures, he was just the same as their dreams. Lines, yes, but the hair was still there, the dark formal suit, the voice. He rose to speak. I have come a long way. He smiled at Geoff. Geoff saw he was looking at Anton’s space. He was weeping in his heart. Geoff knew they were tears of joy. Geoff had presented him something. Look, Stephen, forget your great overlays of complexity.
Look at our children with their infant dreadlocks. Look at our families. As yours drifted away like unclaimed lands, ours grew. And, look, they have come too, to see their parents’ stories made flesh. And look, Stephen, abandon your mock horrors that we still examine the world simply. Look at our work here, in this land you left behind. Let this be your soft moment. Everyone in this room, everyone, all those looking at you and your invisible baggage, that space that walks around you – we have all kept the faith.

All around, the walls were festooned with the photos and clippings of the era. The newspaper account of his own court defence had been turned into a poster. He had forgotten he had cross-examined the consul himself. Supporters were there. ‘You passed me, going down the hill, and invited me to join the contingent. When I refused, you said, “but, ah, thou hast insufficient zeal.”’ Zeal was it? He thought it was not zeal. It was almost comical, but so serious that it inaugurated the tragicomedy of his years. Zeal was when you went single and simple-minded at something. But he recognised the saying: it had been a church inculcation, and that had been the last time he had used it. Everything now seemed like a last time. He had to beware of creating a new fiction of completions. What to do about his real family? And, if not those who were immediate brothers and sisters, what was the family beyond them? At nine that night, before the music and dancing got underway, he left the reunion, slipping out like a ghost returning to its dream. But the Buddha said to leave the table still hungry. Anyway, he was to catch the first flight out next morning, to Wellington, for the Kwoks, his mother’s line, were also convening in the name of reunion, unveiling, formally, that family tree that went back, made a declension of itself, to the high Tang. So I shall be Duke of White Stone, he smiled. I have already been a white stone. A streak of ruby colour fell on me today.

‘What is he like after all these years?’ said Teresa. She was laughing.
Most of the relatives had never seen him for three decades. He never came to the capitol on his sporadic visits to New Zealand. ‘Well, he will wear a very white shirt, which he will have forgotten to button, a very formal dark suit. His hair is still long, but he has cut some inches off for this reunion. He will walk in, look around and, before he smiles, will look like a displaced samurai, appearing suddenly, transmitted across something as simple as time. He may be shaven. He may be sober. Who knows what he is like after all these years?’

True to her advertisement of form, he had cut it almost too fine, racing from the airport. Cousin Frank, the clan leader, just about to begin, looked to his right. Stephen was at the door; 360 eyes turned in his direction. He was embarrassed, so scowled first, before smiling. Then he bowed. An absurd Japanese gesture in a Chinese reunion. Teresa was killing herself with satisfied smiling. He walked, very slowly, to the back of the hall. Teresa was not perfectly right. The suit was crumpled.

It is the day before Remembrance of Ancestors Day. He was looking at a tall ship, docked beside the Te Papa Museum, where they were all seated. He imagined the lychee trees of Heaven. A portrait of Sheng Shee, a great-great-grandmother matriarch, appeared on the screen. When he took his eyes away from the boat, it was like looking at his own mother.

He did not gasp. Something was working here. He looked at Sadie, Frank’s sister, the oldest left in the clan. In her eighties, she was what his mother had wanted to be. She watched Sadie. If you have a forbear, can see the stages of slow, but composed, decline, have a model, then it does not surprise you. But to have it come without warning. Blazing a trail and fifteen years younger than Sadie. He looked at her. She sat like his mother.

Children were looking at him looking at her. He had a small tear in his stomach muscles. From time to time the sudden white pain would crouch him over. He let it happen without expression.

Sadie looked back. She had no idea who he was. She had her own runaway son, somewhere in America. The idea that there could be more than one did not move her. She closed her eyes to hear the
names Frank was reciting. She shook her head, as if recognising them all. He was recognising her recognition.

He looked back at the white ship. The sky was blue. Somehow the ship was leaching colour from the sky. The sky was white now. Whiter. Sadie was making him enter it. There was a boulevard of red pohutakawa trees. They became lychee trees. He saw horses he knew. They led the way beyond the red flowers. The tumult of their hooves gave way to the tumult of a Heaven he had not imagined. The wind blew at him through a huge glass wall. The horses also passed through the wall. Not this time, he thought. He took out his sword to cut his way through the glass gate. On the other side he was simply swept into a maelstrom, becoming something so white it reflected all of Heaven at night.

He emerged slowly back at the reunion. The ship had pulled out and was still blowing its horn. Frank was almost weeping, urging the need for families to stay together. Others were weeping. He had missed the linking bits again. Teresa was looking at him. He was not sweating, but he was paler from the transmission. The Empress Wu is in Heaven, he thought, thundering against all things past. Frank is weeping and it is as if, at last, he has written, so that he might close, a great book of the past.

How do you close a book of the past? Frank was walking all the relatives down the streets of White Stone. For the next few days after the reunion they all kept walking. Teresa had said that, when she and Mother walked them, Mother found memory springing to life, restoring itself. She knew where the school had been, how far away Untouched Boulevard had seemed. Only a mile, with a hill of lychee plantations between. But, before the adult imagination and the adult measures, everything had been a universe away.

The Patient Heart was seated on an aircraft, imagining his relatives – all now catalogued – walking White Stone. The tree’s complete, he sang, the tree’s complete; reaches heaven, and heaven’s replete with White Stoners, White Stoners walk in heaven’s streets. He was bound for Okinawa. In his white robes he would face his Sensei. The older man would look to see if the belt he had given the Patient Heart a full
thirteen years ago had also begun its true fade to white. It was a belt made from toughest cotton. It would not fray and fade like its satin counterparts. Make the Heart work, thought Sensei.

Sensei, what are the measures of Heaven, or even heaven, whichever of the heavens one might imagine or, in the imagination, visit, in dreams, storm?

There is a Kata called Storming the Fortress. How you place your feet determines where you punch. How you spin determines whether the enemy can be reached.

Sensei, I have studied the Way, and the Ways, and just ways for all my life. With you I have been sixteen years. Often, I was your worst student. The least strong. I know you thought this. I knew you were right. I have not been strong.

You have had too many adventures, Heart.

Sensei, what is the geometry of Heaven? What are the measures of our dreams?

Dreams are a tide. Depends how you ride.

The great Air New Zealand plane tossed itself up. Above the white cloud was a universe of blue. He was doubled over with pain as he flew. He imagined asking Sensei why the dreams of New York, of women, of anything at all, had opened onto false trails. How do you know which dreams are reliable?

Who cares if a dream is reliable?

Well then, in the blue skies he saw a Red Emperor, thanking him for arranging the headstone of his wife, asking him to care for his half-brothers and, in his binary ways, just being his father. He saw a White Empress in a white chariot, the past being transmuted at her feet. Gems flew past him. There was a ruby in the sky and he handed it back to the Emperor. Below them all, a long white cloud became, after all, a cloud. He stepped out of the plane, his hair glossy, his robes matching Heaven, and played with his parents. The passengers saw them playing, ah gods, you cannot stop them playing. You cannot stop the dream. You cannot stop the dreamer.

Stephen Chan was a key figure in the New Zealand literary renaissance and the student demonstrations of the late 1960s and early 70s. He helped pioneer modern electoral observation at the elections that gave birth to Zimbabwe, helped in the reconstruction of post-Amin Uganda and in government institution-building in post-Dergue Eritrea and Ethiopia. He has been active in Africa–China trade talks as an adviser to African delegations, in the South Sudanese and Libyan struggles, and in the continuing diplomacy over Zimbabwe. In 2010, the International Studies Association named him Eminent Scholar and he was awarded the OBE. He has published 28 academic books and five volumes of poetry, and is Dean at the School of Oriental & African Studies in the University of London. He has studied martial arts extensively in Japan. As a result of too many adventures, too much thought and too many beatings, neither his brain nor his body function reasonably any more.