The Last Sky Read online

  Over champagne we talked. Her husband was a wealthy American banker and she had a son at boarding school in Boston and a daughter here at the International School. Sometimes I caught faint traces of her Australian accent but it was hard to imagine her as a girl growing up in Adelaide. She told me about their last posting in Peking and the years she spent before that in India. ‘My apprenticeship to the east,’ she called it.

  ‘I’m talking too much,’ she said, putting her hand on my arm. It was a woman’s gesture, intimate. ‘My husband prefers the maid. Says at least she knows how to keep her mouth shut.’

  Then she told me how she once came home from shopping to find her husband fucking the Filipina maid against the wall in the hallway. ‘Just right there in the hallway, with his pants around his ankles.’

  She told me this diffidently, disinterestedly, as if she were telling a story that had happened to someone else.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t do anything.’

  Perhaps I look shocked. Clarissa laughs and pats my hand. ‘You silly thing. Of course in the beginning I was wild and ridiculous. I’d scream and cry and I’d smash everything up. I threw everything I could get my hands on. He’d just lie there with his eyes closed. Put a newspaper over his face.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything?’

  ‘He said, Don’t break the Japanese vases please.’

  I don’t know why Clarissa Ray singled me out to be her friend. Her confidante, as they say. She called me the week after the party at the embassy.

  ‘Maya Wise.’ Her voice was loud, liquid, trickling through the phone into my ear. In the heat of the morning I could see her in her house full of exotica, the rooms full of black wood, carved and latticed; the jade statues, the tapestries loud with silk dragons. She is a woman in a house full of objects, gazing at the shining surfaces of things.

  ‘It’s Clarissa Ray. What are you doing right now?’

  She took me to lunch at the Grand Oriental Floating Restaurant. To get there you have to go down to Aberdeen fishing village and take a sampan through the maze of houseboats, fishing boats, tourist boats. Old women drive the sampans and behind their gaping grins they are quick and shrewd. The water between the boats is still and dusty, without current, although still surfaces like that can deceive you. On the decks of the houseboats scruffy looking dogs are tied up and they observe us sleepily, shaking their ears to flick away the flies as we float past. This water carries debris from the fish markets and the villages upstream: bait, fish heads, a shoe, a dead dog, a dead body.

  The day Clarissa and I went there they were retrieving a body from the water. They had laid it out, covered by a stained tarpaulin between the crates of the fish market. Someone emptied out a bucket and the cloudy water trickled its way down to the covered mound, lapping at the place where the head must have been. The water was pinkish with the stain of fish entrails and to me it looked like blood, fanning out over the uneven concrete. On the other side of the market the fishermen carried on with their work, tossing thick silver fish across the barrels and shouting to each other in harsh tones.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Clarissa said as we weaved our way through the crowd that had gathered around the body.

  Over lunch she talked about her childhood, her school years in England.

  ‘They wanted to rub off the rough provincial edges,’ she laughed, ‘so I could lure a good husband.’

  She stared out of the window, the sun on her hair. Hanging from the ceiling was a cage of parrots, full of wild colours and almost-human calls. I wondered what tropical forests they were stolen from.

  Clarissa sat and watched the parrots. ‘Ruby-throated hummingbird,’ she said softly. I stared at her.

  ‘There used to be bird cards in Lipton tea boxes. My sister and I were wild for them. Luckily we drank a lot of tea in our family. There were all kinds of birds. Lots of wrens and thrushes and robins. But the rarest one was the ruby-throated hummingbird. Everyone wanted a ruby-throated hummingbird.’

  She stroked her throat absent-mindedly. ‘My sister got one in the end. She was just the kind of girl who would.’

  There are people who, years after you have slipped free of the strange entanglements that bind lives temporarily, exist forever in a single sentence, a single moment. Long after all of this, Clarissa Ray will be a girl caught remembering a lost ruby-throated hummingbird.

  After some wine Clarissa asked me about Joseph. I hesitated. I never speak about my husband. It’s as if even one word could begin the release of him from my body.

  ‘When was the first time you knew you loved him?’ She is looking at me with her head tilted to one side, her palm pressed against her cheek. There’s a secret pleasure in the confidences of women, a kind of confessional thrill. The blurriness of intimacy and storytelling.

  Who knows when love begins?

  ‘There was a time,’ I tell her, ‘in the early days, when I went to watch him play rugby. It was his one concession to his father’s idea of manhood, he said. It feels like a long time ago now, standing under the eucalypts at the university oval and watching these sweating men wrestle each other with this weird kind of vigour. Joseph had this single-minded determination about it. He’s the wrong build for rugby, too tall and lean. But he’s strong. And stubborn.’

  Clarissa’s eyes are half-closed and she nods slowly, waiting for more.

  ‘Standing there, watching the look on his face as he was fighting someone for the ball, I kept thinking that it was the same look he has when we’re making love. You know, the eyes closed, the exertion. As if rapture and agony look the same.’

  The boat dips and sways lightly beneath us. I don’t know why I’m telling her this.

  ‘Watching him sweating and fighting, my heart was in my mouth the whole time. I couldn’t bear the thought of blows to his skin. I felt this strange, overwhelming tenderness for him. Is tenderness the same as love?’

  After lunch Clarissa took me to a pearl shop. There were hundred of strands of pearls lined up like bobbly seaweed under the glass. Ivory pearls, pink pearls, pearls as smooth and round as marbles, and odd, lumpy-shaped pearls. A bowing salesman fastened a strand of black pearls around my neck and held a mirror up for me. They shone darkly in the hollows of my collarbone. While Clarissa bought pearl earrings and pearl bracelets, I lifted a strand to my lips, rubbing them against my teeth to see if they were real. They felt gritty and salty, like sand.

  The Rays’ reception rooms are vast, like some elegant hotel. There are elaborate arrangements of orchids in each corner. Outside, the sky has turned dark red and raindrops are splattering on the terrace. Somewhere a dog is barking.

  Most of the women are wearing pale colours. They’re best for the summers. The cool fall of fine linen, the soft lines of silk. They look young and fresh, like schoolgirls at a dance. People are talking about the Handover. Right around the corner now, someone is saying.

  ‘Are people worried?’ I ask one of the men.

  ‘There’s nothing for us to worry about. It’s in their interests to let us be. They’re a clever lot, the Chinese. Making money is all they really care about. Hong Kong wouldn’t be what it is without the foreign interest.’

  Joseph smiles. There’s a kind of cruelty in his smile sometimes. ‘I think Maya might have been referring to the six million Hong Kong Chinese,’ he says, ‘rather than our cosy bunch of ex-pats.’

  The room is silent. I look down at my hands. They look like my mother’s, worn and thin. Someone laughs uncomfortably. Geoffrey Ray claps a heavy hand around Joseph’s shoulders. ‘I’ve lived with the Chinese for twenty years. You don’t have to worry about that lot. They always get by.’

  ‘I’m sure they do.’

  ‘And we hear you’re something of a historian too,’ someone says to me. ‘Art history, isn’t it? Who’s your favourite artist?’

  Joseph puts his arm lightly around me. ‘My wife,’ he says, ‘refuses to be seduced by modern art. She’s very u
nfashionable really. Her great heroes are Poussin and Rembrandt. You really must get hold of her if you want a comprehensive lecture on seventeenth century Dutch portraiture.’

  I think of a time, years ago, when I lay in Joseph’s arms watching the sun play over his face.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why you love Rembrandt so much.’

  I leaned on my elbow, my face above his. ‘His portraits,’ I told him, ‘are not so much posed as. As if he had snuck up and surprised the sitter. The identity is there in the imperfections. The slightly open mouth, the startled expression, the ink-stained fingers. I like the idea that character might be most candidly exposed when caught unaware. Rembrandt anticipated photography. Not in the sense of the duplication of a face, but in the way he could capture the entirety of a character in the revelation of a single instant. A life from which a single moment has been shorn away.’

  ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘the eternal teacher.’

  I looked down at his own face, so composed, the lines carefully arranged in the depiction of a mildly amused smile.

  It’s the same face he has now, years later, leaning against a window in the Hong Kong dusk.

  Later, at the dinner table, they bow their heads to pray. Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts. Eyes closed, hands together, they look earnest, harmless. Joseph and I glance at each other across the table. Shabbat Shalom, I mouth to him. He frowns and looks away.

  Shabbat Shalom. Joseph had a Jewish grandfather and for years he had clung to that strand of imagined Jewishness. He wanted desperately to be Jewish, he told me once. In the long, drowsy hours after lovemaking we would lie under the blankets, our bodies pressed to each other, and tell stories. The stories always had the tone of secrets, the bed the shadowy dimness of the confessional.

  He was, he said, obsessed with the idea of a cultural condition of wandering, of suffering always there, like a mathematical constant. He thought that Jewishness would somehow provide a framework for his own suffering, for his family’s suffering. It was as if pain, he whispered, was something that ran in the blood.

  He adored the aesthetics: the Hebrew language and its throat-catching thickness, the dark spareness of the synagogues and the sonorous hum of the prayers. He loved the heavy dark eyes of the women, the Jewish eyes, and he loved the grand narratives of suffering, of dislocation and loss. He still remembers the words. Driven away from their burning city, the Jews shall live in graves for the next twenty centuries.

  He had a Jewish friend at university and would go home with him for Shabbat meals. This custom he remembers most: at the end of the meal the father would make sure that all the knives were removed from the table. When Joseph asked them the reason they told him that in reciting the customary blessing in which Jerusalem, the holy city, the lost homeland, was mentioned, there was the risk that the grief-stricken Jew would take the knife and plunge it into his heart. It was best that this temptation be removed.

  I remember Jerusalem, the dislocation of Jerusalem. In the dusty heat of the Australian four o’clock I am a girl sitting cross-legged on a dry log, a heavy book on her knees. It is an old book, torn, with yellowing pages. In that book is Jerusalem. There are pictures of high walls and curved domes, earnest pilgrims and a great orange orb settling over the rooftops. There are narrow streets and beggars with burning eyes. Everywhere, there are people praying. In the red dirt of the Australian outback, Jerusalem was a city that existed safely in books, and in books it was to be found.

  It is a dual memory, the Jerusalem memory, and it stands striking, lucid. No dream-caught fragment. In the yard, above the pages of the Jerusalem book, my brothers have dragged a kangaroo they’ve found hit by a truck. There is its face, its dull dead fur, its glass eyes. They’re preparing for a skinning and I can see the flash of their pocket knives. My brothers, their mud-caked boots and their soiled canvas shirts, the stale, sweet smell of them.

  I watch them drag the animal across the bald grass by its tail, its pretty face rubbing in the dirt. I watch the legs splay apart, the knife pierce with strange deftness the pale fluff of the belly and zigzag downwards through the length of the carcass. The blade swishes neatly under the skin and fur is ripped away from flesh. I watch over the rooftops of Jerusalem as the chest is exposed in all its veiny, glistening pinkness. Beneath the dusty fur and the pale green layer of fat there is a universe of colour. Deep reds and dark traceries of blue, patches of yellow and stretched pink sinews. I stare transfixed.

  Above the red sky of Jerusalem are the heads of my brothers, bent intently over their work, the arcs of their knives working the pelt away from the once-living animal. They roll the skin, kangaroo-shaped, into a scroll and wipe their knives clean on their trouser legs.

  Sometimes I wonder if Joseph, when he saw me with my dark eyes and Jewish name, fell in love with an image, a shade.

  I want to write about Ada Lang. In the Kadoorie narrative she is a shadow, or merely the memory of a shadow. A false step in some other, more known, more important story.

  I find traces of story everywhere. At the Hong Kong Club people still remember her. Hardly any of them are old enough to have known her, but stories about her abound: she was so beautiful men turned in the streets, so wicked she frequented opium dens and slept with Chinese men, so mad she lost her mind. She is a fallen woman, a temptress, a martyr, a saint. She drifts, this woman, unknowable, veiled by her mythical hair.

  I am going to look for Ada Lang. I will pick her up at that moment when her ship comes sailing into Shanghai Harbour. When she first began to stir, to move toward me.

  Shanghai. Who knows the beginnings of a city? Shanghai, rising like a dream from the wide, lazy loop of the Whangpoo River. A fisherman leaning on a spear, resin torches, fish nets and the mists of the shallows. A village built on shifting mudflats, as unstable as memory. A city at once reaching skywards and sinking.

  The years fold up neatly. Spread them out like the pleated arc of a Chinese fan. Here are the merchants, the whole world pouring through their fingers: spices, tea, gold dust, crepe de Chine, Shandong silk, chests of opium. Then the Englishmen, the French, the buckles and brass, the twirling moustaches, the sleek lines of the clippers, the strange, sweet smell of opium. The buildings, flaring up like cathedrals along the Bund, the powdered wives stepping tentatively from wave-lapped cocoons of floating space into the clamour of China.

  Then the missionaries, their white veils billowing like sails, their eyes raised to God as they pick their way through the stench of the alleys. And the White Russians, from St Petersburg, from Siberia, running from a red peril. On Easter, crowds of them carrying tall white tapers and crying ‘Christos voskresi.’ On the street they call Blood Alley, shop signs in Cyrillic script swing above their heads. At the Venus Cafe you can pay ten cents to dance with a Russian countess.

  And last of all, the Jews. Not the rich Iraqi Jews with their marble palaces, but the Jews of Europe. The Jews of Russia, of Germany, of Poland. In the shored-up trap of Europe, Shanghai presents itself as a destination., they murmur to themselves, needing only to say the word to conjure up thoughts of freedom, of escape, of a China-blue world miles away from the tongues of the flame. Shanghai, the only port in the world not requiring a visa or entry papers.

  They come across the blank space of Siberia, that strange-looking glass world, the distances that are too great. They come across the Sea of Japan, on ships down the lazy yellow river. Shanghai flows past them in old Chinese streets, wet and heavy with the stench of flesh, of songbirds in wicker cages and baskets of flapping fish.

  They are herded in trucks to damp barracks, where sheets are strung to divide families, to muffle the sounds of grief, the sounds of love. They boil water to drink, they bend over their prayer books, they line up for cups of rice.

  Dressed in heavy European clothes they tramp from door to door in the French Concession selling coffee cups, old silver, Bohemian glass, fur coats. Along the Bund they spread out their books with water-stained pages.

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nbsp; This is Shanghai.

  Ada Lang stands on the deck as China flares into existence. She is heavy-eyed, narrow-shouldered, her hair a fiery thicket. It is summer and already the air is cloying. She cups her hands around her eyes to make a tunnel of shade.

  The harbour is crowded with boats: gunships with wavering flags, opium clippers, merchant boats and fishing junks, and sampans poled by old women. The water is the colour of slick oil. On the dock, bare-chested coolies run up and down planks, old ladies with bound feet stagger past children and beggars, incense and spirit-money peddlers shout their wares, and rickshaws line up along the road. Beyond them a Sikh policeman in a red turban blows on his whistle.

  From one of the ships men are unloading an enormous golden tabernacle, lowering it into a waiting sampan with an elaborate system of ropes. They call out to each other and strange syllables float over the water. Two nuns watch anxiously from the dock.

  Ada Lang watches her reflection in the tabernacle. In the gold-gleam she can see all the distortions of her face, its features expanded, lengthened, multiplied. This is no mirror, with its faithfully rendered reflection, this is light-spiked, multifaceted refraction. A face in all its possibilities.

  In our room above the street Joseph shows me pictures of mummies found in the desert. There is one they call the Beauty of Loulan. She is as old as Abraham, Joseph tells me, holding the picture up to the light.

  The Beauty of Loulan’s skin is blackened with age but her features have been perfectly preserved by the desert sands. She has fine lips and a high slender nose. Her face is decorated with coloured whorls like tattoos. She has long red hair and a robe of indigo wool with a feather sticking up from her hood. In the photograph it looks as if she is smiling.

  ‘Do you know what Iksander said when we found her?’ Joseph asks. Iksander is one of his Uighur guides. I have never seen him. ‘He said this is the most beautiful woman in the world. If she was alive today I would make her my wife. The most beautiful woman in the world.’