The Last Sky Read online

  On nights when it was too hot to sleep he took me travelling through his desert. In the Sand Sea the dunes pile up like tidal waves and great ribs of rock lie in lines like ships frozen at anchor. He speaks about the desert as if he was reciting a poem. ‘No words can properly describe the beauty of those sweeping curves of sand. They have to be seen. In the early morning or late evening when the hills throw cool dark shadows. The world ends out there.’

  The desert is a place of danger. At nights the temperatures drop below zero and there are winds laden with knife-edged particles of ice. And the winds of the day with their driving grains that sting your face and legs like needles. False oases shimmer like distant lakes but are really dry expanses of salt.

  But what fascinates him is the buried history of the desert. The lost worlds of ten thousand years ago when the climate was kinder and men lived there, hunting and keeping cattle, and acacia trees grew in plains of sand. Pomegranates, fruit trees, villages with temples and wells. Trade routes and enmities, gods and kings.

  He tells me about the desert storms. The infamous spring storms, which are called black storms. They come from nowhere, the sky suddenly grows dark, the sun becomes a dark red ball of fire behind a thickening veil of dust. There is a fierce hissing and lashing sand and pebbles. The roar and howl of the storm can last for hours. The men wrap themselves in felts and wait out the violence, huddled against the sides of cars. I see him there, safe, encased in softness in the eye of the storm.

  It was the desert that brought us to Hong Kong. For years, perhaps since before I met him, Joseph had been looking for ways to get back to the desert. In many ways he was a man living in the wrong world. He belonged to a time in history where high-born men spent their inheritances organising expeditions into jungles and deserts. But he had no inheritance, and there were no more benevolent Royal Societies to send clutches of explorers off to the vast and silent reaches of the world. The world was no longer dignified and leisurely and he had to scramble along with the rest of us for travel grants and research fellowships.

  The posting here was a stroke of luck, as they say. Joseph’s mentor, the great sinologist Aurel Stein, had landed a senior position at Hong Kong University and he had helped smooth the way for Joseph. To head up a research team and write a series of reports on the history of the northern desert. The university had money and Stein had vouched for his protégé.

  ‘We’re onto a good thing,’ Joseph said to me excitedly. ‘A pay rise and free housing. We’ll rent out the house here. You can apply for leave. Write. We’ll be all right for money.’

  He knelt in front of me and slipped his hands under the sleeves of my shirt and cupped them around my shoulders. His open palms were smooth and warm. His face was so close to mine I could no longer see his features, only his curling hair against my skin. ‘Say yes,’ he whispered.

  Three months later I found myself in a hotel room above the street in a Chinese city, my husband already packing for a month-long trip to the desert.

  I sat and watched my face in the darkness of the glass and below, the whole city cast into a neon glare. The vast collage of fluorescent signs, their Chinese characters marching one behind each other all the way up to the mountains. All the neon signs are obliged by law to be motionless, Joseph told me, to avoid confusing the navigators of aircraft. And so they stand silent and unblinking. There is something unnerving about the huge, unwavering stillness of them.

  In the hotel room I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning slightly forward so I wouldn’t tip back into the sinking softness of the mattress. I looked down at my shoes, which were soft leather, made to look like ballet slippers. Wrong for this city. The first morning on the streets they were streaked with dirt and grime.

  Three days after we arrived Joseph left on his first field trip. He bent down to kiss me but I could tell that he was already gone, his eye on the desert. He left me, my husband, to the wide empty evenings and the muted stillness of the hotel. To the city. ‘Welcome to Hong Kong,’ one of the brochures says, ‘the Last Crown Colony.’

  Who can best tell the strange history of the island? The sepia soldiers in British scarlet, their great ships furrowing the seas, the brass of their telescopes glinting against the milky blur of the Chinese sky? Or the unsmiling emperors in their palaces, safe behind so much fine gilt and vases blooming with delicate flowers? The broadfaced fishermen, their salt-stiff hands casting the fine lines of their nets against the darkening horizon?

  Over it all hangs not the yellow patina of the past, but the slow, dim haze of opium. The forgetfulness of ether. An island, borrowed or stolen, depending on who is telling the story.

  The story is the story of any colony. The men in their ships, in imagining a paradise, saw a paradise lost, and so one for the taking. It is written in all the books, again and again, the same story. Only the ending has not been crafted yet and it looms, vague and uncertain on the milky horizon. It is everywhere, the talk of June thirtieth, the Handover, the return of the island to its true owners. It seems to me a strange thing, to borrow a place and then to return it.

  In the paper there is an interview with the commander of the British Forces. I can see him in his barracks, the shine of leather and brass, the clean fold of cloth. A man, firm and resolute against a misty Chinese sky, speaking of the duties of Britain, the responsibilities of empire.

  ‘We cannot just throw the key over the border at midnight to the People’s Liberation Army and say: “Carry on.”’

  I imagine a set of keys, glinting brass-bright in the darkness. Tossed, circling, arcing against the huge night.

  I can rescue these things from oblivion, make the island some last testament to the meaning of empire, but in the end they will be forgotten and I will be alone with them.

  I woke early on those first mornings in the hotel room. If I were at home I would be out of bed immediately, coffee made and at work by eight. But those mornings I lay in bed for a long time, staring up at the ceiling. The room felt too vast. I wanted a narrow bed, a low window.

  In the afternoons I walked up to Victoria Peak, the colony’s hill station. After the spring rains the road is deserted and everything shines with moisture. The wax trees, the bowers of jasmine and wild indigo, the wavering butterflies, the birds scattering before me. The villas lie half-hidden in shrubberies, their names shining from brass plates. Cloudlands. The Eyrie. Strawberry Hill. And suddenly, through a frame of trees, the vista of the city. The sea, blue-green, island-studded. The pale skyscrapers of Kowloon, sleek and sun-struck, the ferries making lines across the harbour, the jetfoil streaming across the water. The city is elsewhere, the huge endless stir of it is far from me.

  These will be the things that I will save from oblivion: a young Chinese man stepping out of a pink Rolls Royce, the ceaseless clatter of the streets, the name Cloudlands, the pungent smell of ginger and the vision of a hundred islands rising out of a huge green sea.

  I’m out tramping through the city, staring at the windows of shops or up at the sun glancing off the buildings. In the early morning, before the heat has settled over the city, you can still smell the faint scent of orchids mixed with the dust from the roads and the cool air drifting from the mountains.

  Standing on the edge of the square I see the nightingale man again, the one I followed last week. Sitting at a table outside a shop with a cup in his hands, he turns his head to look at me. Yes, it’s him, the same large eyes, the same slightly hunched shoulders. There’s a hesitance in his look, a quietness.

  Feeling I need to make some sort of gesture, I move forward to say something. He looks steadily at me as I approach.

  ‘Hello. I followed you the other day. I’m sorry. I don’t know why. The bird...’

  The nightingale, he told me many months later, was precious to him because when he was a boy his mother had always kept one in the house. She sang too, her voice echoing the swerves and trills of the bird’s.

  He takes a sip of tea. ‘You did not stay to say
hello.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are the wife of the archaeologist.’

  I nod. I should not be surprised. Hong Kong is a city of undercurrents where everything is known and mysterious at once.

  ‘My name is Ken Tiger.’

  ‘You speak English very well.’, Never trust them when they can speak English better than you, a red-faced American had laughed once to me over a dinner table.

  ‘Yes. I am good at languages. English, French, Russian.’ There’s no boasting in his voice. He smiles at me. ‘Would you like some tea? This is my shop here.’ He gestures behind him.

  The front room of the shop is crowded with plywood shelves full of books. They are mostly Chinese books but I can see a few piles of English novels, some poetry. I follow him through a fringe of bamboo beads into the back of the shop.

  The room is dim and dry. Everything fits, or is wedged, between stacks of books. The nightingale is there, hanging from the ceiling in its bamboo cage.

  There are strange obsessions in people. I met a couple once who collected antique pianos in the same way that other people collect stamps or spoons. They found them all over the world, these pianos, and shipped them home and mended them lovingly. Their house was full of pianos; they lined the walls of every room. In the bedroom there was a huge grand piano pushed up close to their bed. It was an old German model, the husband told me excitedly, the kind of piano that Beethoven would have played. He played a few notes for me. The whole house quivered faintly.

  But no, leave the house with the pianos, leave it for another story. I am here, in a room with bamboo blinds and musty incense with a Chinese man and a nightingale.

  He selects, from drawers full of tea, a tiny pouch and empties the tea leaves into his palm.

  ‘See,’ he says slowly, stretching out his hand to me, ‘how the leaves are not broken but dried into tiny buds. An Oolong.’

  I sniff the tea and look up at him, not sure what I am supposed to gain from the scent.

  ‘It is about all of the senses, the Chinese tea ceremony, not just the taste.’

  He raises the tea to his nose, breathing deeply and closing his eyes as the fine, sharp scent rises from the leaves. I watch his old, smooth face and the dark lines of his eyebrows. It is a ritual, scent for the sake of scent. I can understand. Many times I have lifted a hot mug to my face, letting the steam moisten my nose and lips.

  He takes a tiny teapot from a cabinet against the wall. It is round and squat, like a nectarine, and the colour of the clay that lines the riverbanks in the south of Australia.

  ‘It’s made of clay, no?’

  ‘Yes. Red sand clay. You have to dig very deep to find this kind of clay.’

  He wraps his hands around the teapot. ‘It is all built by hand, a pot like this. Not shaped on a wheel. And there is no glaze. To seal the inside you boil old tea leaves with water for three hours. The oils in the tea seal the pores in the clay.’

  He separates a small handful of tea with fine chopsticks and places it in the pot, pouring the boiling water swiftly over it. He covers the teapot and as it steeps he lines up two cups. They are small and narrow, like spools of thread.

  ‘The mistake people make,’ he says, uncovering the teapot, ‘is to let the tea steep for too long. You must learn when to pour.’

  In smooth arcs he pours the tea into the cups, not pouring one cup at a time, but moving the pot around over the cups so that they fill together. Back home, in the dark bars of the city, I have seen bartenders pour shots of whisky like this, the alcohol slopping onto the counter.

  But this man doesn’t spill anything. He passes me a narrow cup, watching closely as I raise it to my lips.

  We talk, words drift, layer upon layer. He has read Keats, Shelley, Byron. He likes the novels of Charles Dickens. He likes a good story well told, he says. I tell him that I love to read too.

  ‘Love stories?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose love stories. All kinds. They’re all mostly love stories in the end, aren’t they?’

  Ken Tiger stirs his tea with a spoon that looks like a sliver of bone. In the corner the nightingale quivers its wings. Nightingales are very ordinary-looking birds, despite their legendary voices. They are small, with neat brown feathers. The noise of the square comes in from outside.

  ‘Once all of Hong Kong knew my story,’ he says suddenly.

  ‘How did they know?’

  ‘In the same way they know your story, everyone’s story.’

  ‘Yes. They certainly devour news of any scandal here, don’t they?’

  ‘Devour.’ He tests the word out. For a moment he looks like any small boy with a secret.

  I watch the dusty light falling in shafts through the window. It falls across my legs and makes patches on the floor. There have been days this summer when I have sat and watched the light until my eyes ached and my head was thick and heavy.

  He takes one of the books from a shelf above the desk and opens it. Pressed between the pages are the fragments of a flower, paper-thin and crumbling, a purple skeleton staining the pages of the book.

  ‘An orchid,’ he says. ‘Once she unpinned the orchid from her dress and placed it in one of my books. I can think of her for hours and yet it is always that moment I come back to.’ He stares at the outline of the petals.

  ‘She was like you a little,’ he says. ‘Something in the eyes, in the set of the eyes. Her name was Ada Lang. Then Ada Kadoorie. And mine was not Ken Tiger then. She was Jewish, from Russia. She came with the Jews who escaped to Shanghai. There were thousands of them. Did you know that? Thousands.’

  I had not known. I close my eyes. I want the story, as accurate as a slide rule. As fresh as the smell of fennel.

  Somewhere there is an album made up of photographs of Joseph and me. It’s a kind of time-lapse progression of our marriage, from our first smiling poses and happy glances to a different, truer kind of landscape.

  When I first met Joseph he had no photographs of himself. No childhood snaps or rosy-cheeked portraits to put in a silver frame on the piano. I could only imagine him as a dreamy, thin-faced child.

  When we moved into the house by the sea, I used to herd him into the garden and make him sit at the table under the Cape lilac, or stand by the newly planted rose bushes. He was more pliable then, or perhaps happier to please me, and he would stand in the afternoon sun, smiling obligingly.

  ‘You have such a mania for preservation Maya,’ he said to me once as I stared at him through the barrel of the camera.

  Sometimes I would set the timer and dash into the photo. I look slightly flustered in these shots, always caught brushing my hair back or straightening my skirt.

  I don’t know why I needed this evolving portrait, this careful, light-caught tabling of the past. When the photographs were developed I would stare at them for hours, trying to decide what they betrayed or revealed about us.

  Sitting by the window, a foreigner, alone, staring out at the darkening courtyard, I wish I had brought the photographs with me. I need something to remind me that there is another life apart from this displaced, insubstantial one. The apartment is filled with the noise of Hong Kong traffic: cars accelerating, honks, bicycle bells, sirens.

  There was another time when it was not like this. Once we had a real house, friends, a sense of the smooth, round word future. The house was on the bay and all the floors sloped south. There were magpies and purple bougainvillea and warm cedar boards. There were blue dishes from Mexico and a path down to the beach.

  I write about this house in stories. There is plenty to tell. Here is the bed where I lie with my husband late into the mornings. Here is a man holding his wife, his fingers spread against the small of her back, his eyes cloudy with desire. But the image is hazy already, like a photograph where the shutter has been released too slowly.

  At the rattle of the key in the lock, my heart skips foolishly. Dropping his briefcase on the table, Joseph walks slowly into the small living room.

&nbs
p; ‘How’s the lady of leisure?’

  ‘Reading poetry.’

  He looks at the cover of the book on my lap and turns his head to show a small, strained smile. ‘You and your Russians,’ he says, backing into a chair and resting his brogues on the coffee table.

  ‘I wanted to read you something.’ I flick through the pages. ‘Here. There’s this beautiful part where he says that when he thinks of Russia it’s not the continental mass, not the actual area of the earth’s surface. It’s a sound “such as you hear in a sea breaking along a shore.”’

  I look up at him. Since I first met Joseph, I’ve hoarded things I’ve come across in my reading to tell him. Anecdotes, pithy or beautiful quotes, matters or events which moved me. I would offer up my fragments, partly to entertain him, but also as a way to fasten down what I most felt and believed. For a long time I have thought about writing a book about the places where art and life intersect. There would be stories, and fragments of stories, in a kind of cultural anthology of the century. I would have to be very careful, Joseph said, not to sound tremendously pretentious.

  Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in a city on the Australian coast. A high room above the sea, a man and a woman. A time when I loved him simply, wrenchingly.

  ‘Let me tell you about Gaugin,’ I say. Sunlight pours into the room and Joseph smiles at me.

  ‘Gaugin. The wild man. The island dweller. All those gorgeous women. Yes, tell me.’

  He closes his eyes as I’m talking. He looks as if he’s asleep but I can tell he’s listening.

  ‘At the end of his life he was on one of his islands somewhere. It was a miserable existence at the end. He was totally alone. No beautiful women, just a hut he had built for himself in the jungle. It was squalid and sweltering and he had no idea if his paintings would even be remembered. He was dying but he kept painting, kept dragging himself up from his bed to paint a few more strokes. There wasn’t any food and he didn’t have the strength to get fresh water. On the lintel above the door of his hut he had carved the phrase, “Be in love and you will always be happy.”’