Free The White Door by Stephen Chan Page B

and in 1949 the Red Star Brigades swept China, and it seemed like marriage in Parnell forever, in the shop at the end of the world and, in that tumultuous year, born under that star of tumult, came the son bruised black from her two days of labour, the long slippery savage of her womb, and his hair was long at birth, and she loved him like a sole gift.
    He was put, first in a pram, then a pushchair, tethered to a pillar near the double doors of the shop and, as his parents worked, he would silently, never crying, examine the world of trams, children in uniform returning from school, and an unfinished cathedral that shared, with the shop, the apex of a hill, and the sun set like a ball of fire at the horizon that stretched flat from the foot of the hill.
     
    Tethered, he became the centre of attention, and a loving conspiracy. His first motor actions were to learn to shell the small and tender peas, since he was always parked by the bin of peas, eat the peas, replace the empty husks. For weeks, the customers happily bought the husks of peas and only when a stranger complained did the regulars laughingly confess that they had watched delighted at the child’s delicate skill and sought no end to the opera of his fingers.
    But the grandfather, in order to chasten the child, would wait till night, when the family had eaten, and creep outside, and his handwould appear in the window shaking keys and intoning wrath, and the grandmother would say, ‘key key soll will come and get you’, soll being the Chinese word for ‘hand’, so the monster outside the window was clearly a hybrid, and he cared not for the efforts of grandfather hand, ate peas from time to time, and listened to his heart beat late at night to avoid the whine of lovelorn music, like his father husbanded the insults borne by his mother, and, although he sat on the grandmother’s lap and heard the tales of heroes, waited for night when the heart beat like the heavy march of his army.
    Tethered, he watched children return from school. He watched his father work. And life was a shuttle before his eyes and shuttle behind and beside him, and he knew his father hoarded his meagre wages for a shop of his own and he knew the shuttle would be more frenetic, even more urgent then, and pride and richness would make the father love his shop as he already loved his dream of it. And the child thought of schooling and of the white tower; he wanted to own the tower so that, somehow, he would learn its secret; and he measured out the days of school until in his mind he reached the tower; and he knew, one day, though sick and wrapped in a shadow, his father would insist upon entering his shop, for the last day at the last shop, and serving a magically-coloured stone to a customer, would turn from the green emeralds and look at the sapphire dome of the sky.
4: The white horse
    Years later, in the last days of illness, the Patient Heart sent again the white horse. He did it like this: sitting in meditation posture, facing his garden through the French doors, facing an English summer that was as yet still green and the roses climbed, and the ash trees rose over all. The walled garden of the English dream, although he’d been trying to sell this dream for a year, ever since his wife, Penny, had left and the moon girl, Marja, had spent too little time with him there. Yet,exactly there, where the sun came through the French doors, entered from the garden exactly framed, he had made love many times to Marja, and she did not fly off to the moon, and he felt very briefly a normal scholar amidst his books and paintings, and the outside world was ordered though luxuriant, and the outside world met the inside world in a shaft of sunlight on the carpet where the girl of his dreams lay for him and the high birds watched.
    Now he knelt there, loosening his knees for the lotus to come, regularising and sinking his breath. And in the weeks just past it had snowed on him in Johannesburg and he had