The House of Breathing Read online

  I cannot exactly recall when I discovered the clothes beach. I had walked much further than usual in the direction I suspected, when I came unprepared and unforewarned upon it. There, in a little bay, feeling at once vaguely treacherous and certainly transgressive, I suddenly saw them. One glove was draped rather tremulously in the mangroves and the second lay, at a small distance, beneath it in the sand. I contemplated the gloves, so vibrantly white, so innocently tide-cast, and realised at once that I knew something with certitude. I knew that the gloves were incorporated into another realm. They were no longer recoverable, no longer desirable, no longer in fact white. The gloves on the clothes beach—formerly so invested with my movie-tone visions—were absolutely transfigured, remade Aboriginal.

  Touching Tiananmen

  It is a rare kind of fear, and an experience common to many travellers, that one awakens in the night in a state of absolute lostness. Furniture in the room is mere strange monuments, dimensions of windows and walls are false or incalculable, and the surrounding darkness seems simply to confirm displacement. It is a riveting shock: one sits bolt upright, like some monster in a movie, new to the very world.

  Anna sat thus, lost in space. Her heart banged in her body and she watched, half-dreaming, the vague room of her small hotel bevel and shift and fail to settle around her.

  ‘China, Beijing’, she whispered to herself—as though the words themselves might fix things finally, and in fact they did. The room halted and stilled; Anna adjusted her vision to the darkness, saw her luggage in the corner, recalled the position of her room, the face of the hotel manager (perpetually smiling), the facade of the hotel (fifties-totalitarian), the situation of the building in relation to the city centre, the highway, the bicycles, the many statues of Mao. China, Beijing—no delusion at all but an actual city, inveterate and substantial, and in which she now sought her annual vacation.

  Like most cities it had been pre-empted by many versions. When Anna was driven that first day away from the airport she almost expected a skyline of pagodas. She had imagined vistas of lacquered roofs curled imploringly to the sky, tier upon tier of them. Some prospect rather like a willow-pattern plate, but one coloured scarlet and with embossed lettering of gold. Trailing cranes. A pond. The bow of a neat bridge. Mountains unreal and without perspective. And there was, or so it seemed, no origin to this vision; it was simply a confederation of cultural clichés, derived from who-knows-where and mysteriously insistent.

  She sat in the rickety airport bus and saw through its glassless window not pagodas at all but a dense green wood of unfamiliar trees from which issued the drumming of millions of hidden crickets. And further on, into the city, rows of tall grey apartments, most of which were unkempt and in various states of dilapidation, and beside them public buildings of truly ostentatious ugliness. These had a state sponsored gigantism, a quality also evident in statues and posters of Mao which, unmet by the recent Soviet-style iconoclasm, persisted in their confident, moon-faced presence. Mao smiled hugely everywhere; he beamed from hoardings and school yards, in stores and on buses. Or he gestured to the future in marble poses. Something severely utilitarian governed Beijing; Anna felt almost deceived; she wondered where the exotic decoration was secreted.

  There were of course touristic dimensions to the city; and within the first week of her visit Anna had trudged dutifully in and out of Imperial palaces (noting that opulence for which revolution was finally the only response), climbed arduously and achingly a few kilometres of the Great Wall (recalling Kafka’s perverse version within which he alleged it to be the foundations of the Tower of Babel), gawked inside temples (touched by the melancholy of the mere handful of monks who now attended them, by the Mao-looking buddhas, also gigantic), and searched out those few stores whose task it is to supply Westerners with trinkets and superfluities (ah, the brilliancy of cloisonné, the statues of jade, embroidered silk nightware and ornaments of lapis and coral).

  But she remained somehow disappointed. Alone and monolingual, she was aware that she dealt merely in pre-visions and exteriorities. She knew no Chinese people, and walked among them like a kind of object, conspicuous but inhuman, inaccessible to them as they were to her, without insides, a doll. And when she had accomplished one by one the tourist locations, she was left curiously unsated and felt almost a physical hunger growing within her.

  Anna did not leave Beijing at her travel-agent appointed time. She lingered, without particular cause or purpose, moving first to a smaller and less expensive hotel (that of the fifties-totalitarian facade), delaying her flight to Hong Kong again and again. She became suspended, as it were, in her own unidentified species of longing. Days were spent in the hotel room, lying behind shutters in the false luxuriousness of her new silk lingerie.

  Then she began tentatively to venture, down the hutongs, or backstreets, in which were to be discovered little buildings, whole little communities, that existed almost in the crevices of the modern city. Below looming apartment blocks were remnants of shanty houses made of sticks; and away from the Chairman’s smirking invigilation lives recovered their unbureaucratic disorder. Communal televisions blared loudly at squatting groups. Hawkers pushed handcarts of peaches or spinach. Tailors worked outside at ancient treadle sewing machines and old men and old women meditatively smoked. Children dragged toys or engaged in mock battles. Everywhere were bamboo birdcages placed to entrap crickets, and meat of extraordinary redness hung on hooks at windows.

  As Anna lost herself there, irretrievably foreign, she felt the gazes of others resting upon her, like the lightest of touches on the nape of the neck, like a lover’s caress. And when the gazes at last accumulated to the point of disturbing her, she would make her way back to the main roads, and there trace a route back again to the hotel.

  The city became gradually stranger and stranger. At first, appearing both pagoda-less and high-rise-full, it had seemed comprehendible. But Anna began by degrees to perceive its particularities. The bicyclists of Beijing, seven million or so, moved processionally everywhere: in their inordinate numbers and slow-moving continuity they gave the city a kind of animated and silken effect, recalling a rippling of fabric, a perpetual motion of undulation. And the sound of crickets, which had at first seemed simply a quality of the forest, became ubiquitous. Even at the very centre of the city Anna could hear them. They were an invisible presence, rising, every now and then, to murmurous notice.

  Human language also seemed somehow to have altered. Initially Anna had thought she understood the shape of Chinese, its intonations of inquiry, of affection, of polite conversation; but the more keenly she listened the more the language was complicated, the more sounds and circuitous patterns it contained. Her hope of achieving a tiny vocabulary of a few pragmatic phrases faded entirely away. She found herself feeling muted, without language at all. Only in her dreams did she speak Chinese, and then it was of some imperial and antique form, denoting not equitable discourse but that of a foreign devil somehow evilly collusive with old regimes.

  As the language multiplied so too did the people, and Anna became overwhelmed by the sheer number of different faces she saw around her. The old woman who sold iceblocks from a tub-on-wheels at the corner, the man who each morning led a Mongol pony dragging a cart filled with watermelons, the youths at the hotel who smoked illicitly in clusters and then jerked to attention, mock deferential, as she passed: all these people now seemed possessed of captivatingly individual features. Anna found herself staring, as though some secret would yield itself if one of these faces opened up to her.

  She had never before felt so irreparably lonely.

  One Beijing day, a day in which that loneliness hugged her closely like a net, she re-visited, on impulse, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. In the square itself all was festive and bright. Family groups sucked on icecreams and children flew kites that trailed dragon shapes with fantastical tails. Photographers had set up stalls covered over by umbrellas
and with old-fashioned looking cameras snapped groups of people in what to Anna appeared exaggerated poses.

  She stood behind one photographer and looked with his vision: a family of five—parents, apparently, with their overindulged product of the One Child Policy, a girl of about seven, be-ribboned and be-frilled, another adult, perhaps the aunt, and an old woman in peasant black, the putative grandmother. Behind them, in the distance, was the threading apparition of Beijing bicyclists flowing westwards and eastwards, and beyond them the crimson gates of the Forbidden City, surmounted by an enormous square portrait of Mao and framed at each side by four huge red flags. Anna lowered herself to the tripod’s height—all the better to see photographically—and noticed then that the parents were gesturing to her. They were calling her over to be included in their family snapshot and the photographer turned around to add his own cheerful invitation. Anna felt herself blush. She took a place in the group—between the aunt and the mother—and was instantaneously memorialised, there, anonymously, in Tiananmen Square. Members of the family bobbed, smiled and spoke Chinese; Anna retreated with uncivil haste.

  As she roamed the square, singular and Occidental, Anna began to fancy that she was being followed. She looked back from time to time and there, indeed, was a young man upon her tracks, a man whose face had a distracted and agitated look, as though he himself was anxious or under surveillance. Anna wove a little in her path, like some devious spy, only to turn again and find she was correct in her surmise: the man still followed. She halted, summoned her courage, and walked back to confront him. The man shuffled uneasily and looked embarrassed.

  ‘Amerika?’, he promptly asked.

  ‘Australia’, Anna answered, pleased at least that this man could converse in English. But then, quite unprovoked, he seized both her hands and with a kind of madman’s intensity mumbled some sort of enigmatic slogan.

  ‘Yoon faw, yoon faw.’

  Anna was alarmed. She broke free and ran; she stumbled over flagstones and headed, heart pounding, in the direction of the Forbidden City. When she slowed to look back the man had disappeared, absorbed into the crowd of milling people, itself unimpressed and indifferent to her flight.

  From the lookout on the gate Anna peered over the square. She could see parti-coloured circles of umbrellas, people in holiday groups, and a contingent of Red Army soldiers, identifiable by their khaki uniforms and little caps, gathering casually at the Martyr’s Memorial in the centre.

  This was where, only one year ago, hundreds of thousands of students had taken up occupation. This was where a styrofoam Statue of Liberty, ten metres high, had been utopianly erected. This was where the military had murderously advanced through the darkness. Where tanks had entered and bayonets been raised. Anna found herself scanning the vista for tell-tale signs, for blood stains or tank tracks, not knowing the square had been re-paved after the purge. Then she began to feel ill. She was aware of repressing memories derived from television: she would simply not allow herself to consciously recollect. Below her all was sunlit and apparently ahistorical. Bicycles moved along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, entrammeled in their own lanes and glidingly unreal. The sound of crickets drifted upwards from emerald coloured trees.

  Anna entered the Forbidden City as though seeking refuge. The Imperial buildings were so arranged as to imply security: she passed through gate after gate, through hall after hall, up and down series of steps and across numerous courtyards—architecturally it connoted an almost tyrannical orderliness. Geometrical. Severe. Contrived to express both the physical and metaphysical supremacy of each emperor.

  It was also a site where Westerners were known to congregate. Anna roamed the crowds and chose to linger behind a group of German tourists whose leader pronounced on everything in a tone of schoolmasterish annoyance. The tourists were quiet and subservient, and one or two turned to smile at Anna as though she were a long-lost German. From somewhere nearby fragments of English commentary came drifting on the breeze:

  ‘The vermilion colour of the walls is achieved by an admixture of pig’s blood …’

  but Anna was reluctant to accede to the explanations of her native tongue, or to join actually or in spirit the group of Americans so addressed.

  Anna drifted away from the Germans and wandered among the more numerous Chinese through the Hall of Preserving Harmony past the Nine-Dragoned Wall, into the Pavilion of Pleasant Sounds, losing herself in pagodas triumphally layered and curved, in room after room of palatial exotica. There were golden bells, extravagant timepieces and ceramic urns of exquisite artfulness. Blackwood furniture, latticed and carved, stood sombrely in corners and upon it were silk draperies embroidery-emblazoned with heavenly beings, phoenixes or brilliant clusters of chrysanthemums. Whole worlds had been carved of varieties of jade, the histories of which were related painstakingly on scrolls. There were astronomical instruments of brass, costumes of opera singers and eunuchs, and jewellery fashioned from every imaginable precious metal and stone. In one hall was a kind of funerary pagoda, perhaps two metres high and of solid gold, in which were retained fingernail clippings and cut hair of the Empress dowager. Oddities, spectacles, artifacts preposterous.

  This was a peculiar alienation, to be wandering alone, excommunicated, among so many immoderate objects. Anna had visited this place before, but was now struck for the first time by its quality of obsessive artifice. Everything seemed covered over, embellished, fabricated or beautified. She felt both awestruck and suffocated, both enchanted and repulsed.

  Anna made her way rather quickly through the remaining pavilions and halls seeking out the exit that was somewhere ahead, but found herself halted in a small courtyard that she could not remember having seen before. An Englishman was standing before a small stone circle lodged in the earth, and was apparently narrating a story to an assembly of old women:

  ‘One day—this was in 1900, almost the end of the Ching Dynasty—the Empress dowager was so annoyed with her daughter-in-law’s, the Princess’s, reforming zeal and rebelliousness, that she arranged her execution. In the dead of the night four of her eunuchs stole silently into the splendid bedroom, seized the Princess, and dragged her screaming to the well. Imagine, if you will, the cries in the night, the pleas of the woman as she was stuffed, headfirst, into this tiny hole. As she drowned. In the darkness.’

  Anna glanced again at the stone circle, and around it the rather melancholy group of old women, then hastily walked away.

  Anna began to visit Tiananmen Square each and every day. She had no particular reason to do so, but was in some way drawn to experience again and again the disconcerting sense of a place which was historically amnesiac, which had obliterated its recent past so utterly and so efficiently. She could not have said why this phenomenon so strangely fixated her: she was simply adrift in another country, caught, after all, in the illusion of a continual, sufficient present. Otiose. Unmotivated.

  She walked the large square and mingled, as though indigenous, with the camera-happy crowd at their summer-time leisure. There was always a long line of people—whom Anna assumed to be waiting to see Chairman Mao somewhere embalmed in his crystal casket—but otherwise there was the pleasurable roaming of groups such as occur anywhere in public domains. She watched the kite-fliers and the soldiers, the families and the publicly tentative lovers.

  And each day, moreover, she watched the young man. Like her he regularly visited the square. He was always there somewhere, and some days he noticed her presence and some days he did not. Anna never approached the man, nor he she, but began to look out for him, as though to locate his figure in the crowd was the actual purpose of each visit. She would buy an iceblock or a roasted corn cob and trail between groups, leaving after an hour or two; and only once she had sighted the object of her search.

  It was on, perhaps, the sixth or seventh day that the young man approached her. With no subterfuge at all he simply walked directly to greet her, as i
f a meeting had been arranged. He stood there before her and Anna noted that he had a kind of haunted aspect to his face. He was handsome, lean, his skin beautifully ginger, but there was also some quality of despair, of prepossession. Anna imagined for a moment that this man would become her friend, that he would guide, translate, and at last open up the secrets of Beijing.

  But in an extraordinary repetition—shocking now precisely because it had a precedent—the man seized both Anna’s hands and again chanted out the slogan:

  ‘Yoon faw. Yoon faw.’

  She did not break away, sensing this time that the act was not aggressive or threatening, but simply inexplicable. Yet as the man noticed that she had failed to understand his words, he became distressed.

  ‘Yoon faw’, he repeated. And he pulled Anna’s wrists downwards so that her hands actually made contact with the warm paving stones. Then the man broke into tears, released her, and left.

  Anna had a nightmare in which she roamed the Forbidden City on a pitch-black night. She was entirely alone, but around her drifted the most splendid objects: ceramic vases, silk garments, carvings of ivory and jade. As she made her way through the darkness these objects seemed to flow with her, as if held in mystical orbit by her body or her movement. She came at last to a room in which she saw the golden pagoda that she recalled from waking inspection contained fingernails and cut hair. But as Anna moved closer to the pagoda—it seemed to draw or compel her—the dream instantly shifted mode and she saw enacted before her the tale of the princess drowned by eunuchs. There was the dowager Empress looking on, and there was the struggling woman, screaming out her own doom. The four eunuchs, gloriously homicidal in ivory silk, seemed effortlessly to contain and transport the princess: they moved in dream motion, as if mounted on wheels. And though the prisoner writhed, caught in her mobile human frame, the Empress simply stood, regnant and cruel.