his taxi, meter still running, and left to start to find one of his parents – that one not in China, constructing a cosmic endgame for history’s tricks of going walkabout with its wooden plaques; that one beginning the endgame to his life, unknowingly but somehow always deliberately setting out his array of light-meters, and framing the blue sky, untarnished in its intensity, for a perpetual sun-ridden matinée.
WHITE WARRIOR
1: The girl of the moon
Many years in the future, when he was lamenting the loss of his eighth truly significant woman, he fell to writing again. Her name was Marja, Finnish Marja, pronounced Marr-ya, with a rolled second ‘r’ and an inflected ‘i’ before the ‘y’. No one could say it properly, so all his friends called her Maria, and she answered their insufficiency. Finnish Marja would smile as she was addressed as English Maria. The eighth woman. All his life there had been a girl of the moon, someone to cry over in the high night of her increasing absences; then there would be an elegant older woman, who would drive her own sports car and be good to him in bed, and who would want him totally; then there could be a wife of capacious gifts, an academic of great strength, who would eventually leave him. Then the cycle would be repeated – and he had gone through two complete cycles now, calling out the names of the moon girls in his married sleep, and with the advent of the third cycle there came certainly the sports car-driving woman, an aristocrat this time, and a moon girl of such astonishing beauty he prayed with all his heart that the cycles would stop and she, at last, would be the moon girl made wife, the eighth and last of the traumatic pageant of beauty. And anyway, for him, eight was a holy number, written without beginning or end as two seamless circles that fed each other. Feed me, Marja, he would whisper, pronunciation correct, under themoons of a long and only briefly answered year.
When he was a child, just learning memory, the moon meant something entirely different. Instead of pretty pretty moon, the repetitive coo of New Zealand mothers, he got pretty light light, since he was, he remembered he was told, Chinese. And he was called Happy Occasion at a Grand Court. Since, later, he learned that his father’s name meant Red Emperor, he was happy enough to be an occasion of any sort in his palace of dreams. There was a palace of dreams in Parnell, Auckland, on a hill that overlooked the harbour cranes, and his combined first memory was of poverty. Then his father would carry him out of the poverty-ridden shop, into the life of the sky, and they would watch richer sunsets than he ever saw again, and the cranes would burn, and the moon like an impossible goddess would rise from her land of snow and seep into the heavens till it filled his sky. Poverty, sunset, sky: this was the Parnell of his soul.
There was a Parnell of his heart, and this was green. Green, because behind the shop, beyond a crescent that sloped away, a great domain of trees had jumped to giant life – taller, grown faster than in England – and these acres were called, presciently, the Domain. In the middle of the Domain, on a hill he would clearly see, there was a huge white museum, and it was called – simply, rather than presciently this time, since it looked like a Roman temple, and later he imagined it was a Roman temple – the Museum; and his father said all the past is contained in the Museum, and that was why, he thought, birds sang in the green Domain, to honour the past in the white Museum.
But the green was in his heart because that was where his parents taught him love and laughter – even though they were poor and the world they had escaped grew older than belief. They taught him all the polite paths through the green – what they themselves were learning. Later, as a young man, he taught himself the hidden trails among the great trees, skipping over the heartfelt roots of heaven every
WHITE WARRIOR
1: The girl of the moon
Many years in the future, when he was lamenting the loss of his eighth truly significant woman, he fell to writing again. Her name was Marja, Finnish Marja, pronounced Marr-ya, with a rolled second ‘r’ and an inflected ‘i’ before the ‘y’. No one could say it properly, so all his friends called her Maria, and she answered their insufficiency. Finnish Marja would smile as she was addressed as English Maria. The eighth woman. All his life there had been a girl of the moon, someone to cry over in the high night of her increasing absences; then there would be an elegant older woman, who would drive her own sports car and be good to him in bed, and who would want him totally; then there could be a wife of capacious gifts, an academic of great strength, who would eventually leave him. Then the cycle would be repeated – and he had gone through two complete cycles now, calling out the names of the moon girls in his married sleep, and with the advent of the third cycle there came certainly the sports car-driving woman, an aristocrat this time, and a moon girl of such astonishing beauty he prayed with all his heart that the cycles would stop and she, at last, would be the moon girl made wife, the eighth and last of the traumatic pageant of beauty. And anyway, for him, eight was a holy number, written without beginning or end as two seamless circles that fed each other. Feed me, Marja, he would whisper, pronunciation correct, under themoons of a long and only briefly answered year.
When he was a child, just learning memory, the moon meant something entirely different. Instead of pretty pretty moon, the repetitive coo of New Zealand mothers, he got pretty light light, since he was, he remembered he was told, Chinese. And he was called Happy Occasion at a Grand Court. Since, later, he learned that his father’s name meant Red Emperor, he was happy enough to be an occasion of any sort in his palace of dreams. There was a palace of dreams in Parnell, Auckland, on a hill that overlooked the harbour cranes, and his combined first memory was of poverty. Then his father would carry him out of the poverty-ridden shop, into the life of the sky, and they would watch richer sunsets than he ever saw again, and the cranes would burn, and the moon like an impossible goddess would rise from her land of snow and seep into the heavens till it filled his sky. Poverty, sunset, sky: this was the Parnell of his soul.
There was a Parnell of his heart, and this was green. Green, because behind the shop, beyond a crescent that sloped away, a great domain of trees had jumped to giant life – taller, grown faster than in England – and these acres were called, presciently, the Domain. In the middle of the Domain, on a hill he would clearly see, there was a huge white museum, and it was called – simply, rather than presciently this time, since it looked like a Roman temple, and later he imagined it was a Roman temple – the Museum; and his father said all the past is contained in the Museum, and that was why, he thought, birds sang in the green Domain, to honour the past in the white Museum.
But the green was in his heart because that was where his parents taught him love and laughter – even though they were poor and the world they had escaped grew older than belief. They taught him all the polite paths through the green – what they themselves were learning. Later, as a young man, he taught himself the hidden trails among the great trees, skipping over the heartfelt roots of heaven every
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