The White Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

and return (briefly) to his village, robed in red, a scholar’s cap with tassels on his head, mounted on a white horse, and extract family/widowed mother from poverty. Look at my son, the mother would say, he studied every night and worked to support me every day. Now this is the consummation promised for virtue. If the scholar came home only to a widowed mother, they would go and burn incense at the father’s grave and the red-cloaked scholar would weep tears of filial piety.
    Such a father’s dream, thought Teresa, only her brother had really done it, gone off and taken not one but two doctorates, then, after nearly crippling himself in a karate accident, disdained the academy for the life of an international official mediating in the world’s forgotten and usually useless conflicts. Teresa laughed. In the films, the scholar was usually thin and physically useless. The daughters of the concubines must have dreaded each year’s exams. Often, taking mother to her new home in the capital, they would be attacked by warlord brigands. Then it would be weedy scholar’s true love fromthe village, the heartlost beauty of the paddyfields, following secretly behind, who would rescue them with heroic Kung Fu spinning kicks, take a fatal thrust, and die in her worthless scholar’s puny arms. Brother was always beset by the competing loves of women too. At least he was able to kick ass for himself – rather, he could do so with his good left leg. The right was a Byronic reassemblage of bones with pins and, on a good day, carried him convincingly in unknowing company.
    Teresa moved. Dog wanted her piece of floor. She looked at the portraits and dreamed of a perfectly-shaped mountain of peace, the return of brother and the satisfaction of her restless parents. For something had changed after the journey to White Stone, as if mother now knew that half of adult life had ended and, as her children drifted variously into marriages and divorces, that such aspects of life, maybe most of life itself, was a series of charades that sought to re-enact or recapture some primal grasp of acceptance in the world on one’s own terms – even one’s compromised terms, but terms in which one had made a stand of sorts, over which one had had a say. Love me, leave me, accept me, go away, come back, come back more gently, why can’t the vision of you be as the vision of you before?
    It could never be as before, thought Teresa. Otherwise the planes would fly faster, the horses gallop more rapidly, rejecting the true nagging knowledge that they were returning their wearied riders to only an impression of their origin. If I could see Rangitoto, she thought, I would know that any journey was symmetrical, a dance around a perfect cone; any stop was like the last departure; and it would all be washed by sparkling waters; and paradise would be the certain regularity of knowledge, a time that passed well anchored.
    If brother were here, she thought, he would offer one of his alarmingly technical philosophical discourses, which simply said he did not know, but he would say so like a gentle cone, brother spinning words around himself like a smooth trouble-free volcano. He would grow green trees on lava slopes and all his jumbly conditionals would be said in a soft speech like the thigh of his latest lady in his latest dream. He, at least, went happily from vision to uxorious vision, butTeresa had long vowed she would never even dream of marrying again. Dog followed a progression of assured, sunlight squares on the floor. One heart, one square, one life, thought Teresa, no great hairy dog she, but one firm arrow in the world, centred, fastened, targeted and certain till the end of time.
4: The black sheep
    How high is the water. How high is the water. A description, not a question. Looking towards Chelsea as the train crossed the bridge, thinking of homes, seeking a houseboat, moored, a damp but light-filled destination. Instead of this dream, he thought,