Fire and Ritual.

4

Temple in Hanoi, Frank McKenna, Unsplash

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap here).

4.

In The Lover * MD said she had no childhood; that the story of her life did not exist. Her statement is not surprising—her family was always on the move from town to town along the Mekong River with occasional trips back to France. It was a life of endless departures and arrivals from far off places — they would just be settling in when they’d have to pack up and move all over again.  In her notebooks MD describes such a scene in a random port — the children huddled around their mother in a tired tangle of luggage as she negotiates their next move. No cosy walled garden to play in, no permanent dwelling to call home, no fire burning in the hearth. Fiercely protective, caring for her offspring as a lioness does for her cubs, MD’s mother shepherded them from place to place, in and out of anonymous houses where they would camp a while before moving on.  *

         My mother's little family moved often too, but instead of following a river, they followed the railway line.  Marj’s father, James Gingell, worked his way up from station hand to station master as they moved on up the line — Camperdown, Castlemaine, Maryborough, Ballarat and finally Melbourne where he became head signals controller at the busy Flinders Street Station. As an only child Marj was never lonely; she had plenty of cousins to play with and the advantage of not having to share her parent’s love with other siblings. Her mother Jeanie played piano and sang at the local dances and Marj took up the piano too.  She always said her childhood was a happy one, filled with music, laughter and warmth, but when I went searching in the mustard-coloured suitcase for confirmation, no photos of Marj as a prepubescent girl or teenager could be found. On Pinterest I’d found quite a few of teenage Marguerite, and through them could imagine my mother’s girlhood looks. Teenage Marguerite often wore skirts to the mid calf, smart blouses, shoes with a solid block high heel and there is an occasional photo of her in a summery dress smiling at the camera with a mischievous look.

Marj would have been both shy and cheeky like Marguerite, a girl who loves life, despite her mother's illness when so young. Marj would love her mother to bits just as Marguerite did, would bask in her attention, would perform clever acts just for her, would learn to play Chopin's waltzes on the family piano, play the organ at church and ride her bicycle down to the station where her father was assistant station master. A favourite of all the young women who worked in the station refreshment rooms, she would watch all the well-dressed passengers rushing the long wooden counters to order thick rimmed mugs of milk brown tea and freshly baked Cornish pasties. As fast as they’d arrived the crowd would be gone again, back into their wood paneled, leather upholstered train compartments, as my Grandpa Jim blew the whistle and raised the flag, letting the engine driver know it was safe to proceed. Then there’d be time for Marj to become the centre of attention as the refreshment room girls in their starched white caps and aprons treated her to a lamington and a conversation about how she was going at school.  She was doing well of course, always near the top of the class, although perhaps not quite as well as Marguerite, who in her final primary year was dux of the whole of Cochin China, the region of southern Vietnam.

        I feel a little dispirited as I head back to the lake to join the exercising crowd. I follow the throng until I find myself at the entrance to a curved red bridge that leads to a small island situated at one end of the lake. A couple of thin grey-haired photographers, old enough to have fought in the American War ( which is how the Vietnam War is known here), are leaning on the rail at its entrance, chatting and sharing cigarettes before their tourist snapping day begins. I step onto the bridge and it comes to me in a flash. If indeed the house her mother purchased was nearby, Marguerite must have come here as a child. Surely she would have skipped across the bridge with her nanny or houseboy while her mother was busy teaching. I entertain this idea as I cross the bridge to the gateway of the island and pay a few dong for my ticket. Under the leafy shade of trees dangling their branches in the pea-green water, past a fireplace where paper offerings to the dead are smouldering in a pile of ash, I arrive in the courtyard of a small temple. 

Thin whirls of smoke rise up from an incense brazier and curl themselves around the decorative ceramic relief set beneath terracotta eaves. I peer in through the temple’s carved red doors, the air around me feels cool and peaceful.  

          I find my way into a small room next to the temple that tells the history of the lake and learn that giant turtles, like the one in the glass case in front of me, once inhabited the lake and that yes, this temple was built long before MD and her family arrived. They too would have learned the myth of how the Golden Turtle God, Kim Qui had given the Vietnamese Emperor Le Loi a sword to help fight the Chinese. One day after Vietnam had achieved their independence, Le Loi was boating on the lake when the Turtle god appeared. Le Loi thanked him and returned the sword (named Heaven’s Will) to the turtle who carried it down to the depths of the lake. Hence the lake is named Hoan Kiem, Lake of the Restored Sword.

          I step through another door that leads back into the temple and arrive before an elaborately carved wooden altar where a couple of elderly Vietnamese ladies are lighting incense sticks and doing the rounds of various deities. Not knowing whom my prayers might be for, I follow suit, taking a couple of sticks from a dispenser and lighting them from a candle. Then I feel it, as strongly as if she were standing right beside me; the presence of my little mother, Marjorie.

Today I crept out

very early

and cut some precious rare flowers

that bloomed without care:

purples and blues and rose pinks

I nipped the stems

soaked them to their necks

arranged them in a tall pot

dropped in one aspirin

sprayed them every hour with cool water

before bed changed the water in the pot

Next day

they were dead

and if this terrible heat

continues

I’ll be dead too          

MC 1981

       My mother, Marj Cornall (nee Gingell), was an amateur artist and poet whose often darkly humorous words although never published, inspired and entertained all who read them. Her rushed sketches and unfinished oil paintings still vibrate with her creative spirit and remain my most precious possessions.  She was eighty-seven years old when she died in her sleep at the beginning of 2006, several days after I’d arrived in Jakarta on a four-month writing fellowship. Because of my tight budget and visa constraints, I couldn’t return for her funeral. And while throughout the long depressive illness of her adult life she had told us often enough she wanted to die, and there’d been some scares in recent years, at the time of my departure there was no inkling she was close to death. Before I left I’d spent a precious day with her at her at her nursing home where I reminded her as I did on most visits, how grateful I was for the life she had given me, and how her creativity lived on in her kids and grandkids.

For the grand children.

My little bell

Rings like hell

I go to the door

Tis two men or more

Selling stuff

I ignore

So bang

goes the door!

MC 1984

          Marj was feeling a little off colour, but as I tucked her tiny sparrow-like body into bed, she still managed to ask me detailed questions about all my friends and activities. I gave her the news and told her how happy I was to be going back to Indonesia for a long writing stint and would send postcards and letters as usual.  I hadn’t imagined my next postcard would be her eulogy.

        My kids, then aged 23 and 19, represented me at the funeral. My daughter, Cyd, read out my words with confidence and my son, Louie, smsed me a running narration of the proceedings from the funeral home chapel.

        ‘Hi Mum, heaps of peeps here, all going in now.’

       ‘Hi Mum, finished the service, Cyd did good, who are all the people I don’t know saying hello to me?’

       ‘Hi Mum, having tea and tim tams.’

       ‘Hi Mum, Marj is in the hearse now. We are waving her goodbye.’

        His messages made me feel as if I was almost there, but now Marj was alone on her way to the crematorium and I needed some kind of ceremony of my own to send her off. I’d recently read an article about klenteng (temples) in Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, so I ran out of my boarding house and hailed a taxi. Glodok wasn’t so far and the joss house temple I found there was much bigger than this one in Hanoi, with many inner and outer sanctums and courtyards. While for years I’ve been a student of Buddhism, the Tibetan school I follow is quite different to the Chinese variety. But I needed fire and ritual and this crowded temple was full of smoke and people going from altar to shrine to deities to giant red candles taller and fatter than any man — waving bundles of sweet-smelling incense and praying with such fervor that I knew it would help. I joined the queue to a table where an old Chinese man was selling incense and purchased a huge bundle. Lighting the whole thing at a burner, I went about as they did, praying to dragons, goddesses, tall ceramic bearded men (strangely reminiscent of my dad who had died 12 years earlier), bowls of oranges and Ming vases full of gladioli and the red, red, redness of it all, asking for her safe passage to wherever she was headed.

        How I didn’t manage to seriously ignite myself or someone else, I don’t know, but I hoped all my burning and waving had somehow led her to an eternal eucalypt forest where she could pick wild pink heath and hunt green hooded orchids to her heart's content.

        A pragmatist at heart, Marj had given up on churches long ago. When a nurse once asked her religion for a form she was filling out, without missing a beat, Marj answered, ‘nature’. Now, in Hanoi, standing in front of the flower and fruit laden altars of this small pagoda on Hoan Kiem Lake, I realise she is not in that eucalypt forest, but here in this temple and every other joss house I will ever visit.

           The elderly Vietnamese ladies pass by again and smiling and nodding, lifting their palms to their foreheads in prayer. I smile back. I plant my incense stick in the brazier next to theirs and hope in the mingling of smoky perfume, wherever she is, Marj will watch over them and they her.

We were up there one dew filled morning

dog and I

racing through masses of wildflowers

When we got home

my white jeans

bore a printed pattern

of mauve and pink

painted by petals

MC 1980

          Stepping back into the courtyard, I contemplate the whereabouts of MD again. I haven’t managed to find her house and there is no way of knowing if she ever visited this temple, but if she did, that means I am standing on hallowed ground. I don't know whether to pray, mumble mantras, or jump up and down on the spot. There aren't many people around so I slip off my shoes and attempt to walk as casually as I can on every flagstone in the courtyard, rubbing my feet into the paving stones in the places I think Marguerite's four-year-old footsteps would most likely have fallen. I even rip out some pages of my notebook and make some rubbings with my lead pencil. If there is a possibility of taking home some kind of evidence of a place where a child who happened to become a great writer, may have stood — why not do it? And if this is a hallowed place, why not put it to the test, why not scan the small courtyard for a place to sit down and write?

          I choose a spot that looks across to the small pagoda rising out of the water at the other end of the lake and setting down my bag of fruit and books, lower myself onto the holy flagstones. I lean back against a pillar, taking out my plain paged moleskine notebook and smooth rolling pen and stare into the close distance, thinking, thinking...

          ...about the pain in my right shoulder from sitting uncomfortably in budget airline seats and carrying luggage on the side I know I should avoid. About how I must remember to carry a small air cushion for moments like these, like the travellers I scoff at near the departure gate who wear them around their necks before they even board — as if I am some kind of tough flyer or no-frills expert, shunning the comfort package, then wishing I had socks and a blanket like the person sleeping peacefully next to me. About how next time I fly I won't order gluten-free vegetarian unless I want to eat two pieces of cardboard with a lettuce leaf stuck between them!

          A bunch of noisy school kids invades the quiet of the courtyard. My bottom is numb and my notebook empty.  I get up, gather my stuff and make my way to the exit. Just before the gate I stop in front of the barely smoking fireplace where people have thrown in fake paper money to help the dead on their journey in the afterlife. I tear the empty page from my notebook and chuck it in. It’s a symbolic gesture I know, but I need help in this life not the next. I wait long enough to watch the edges of my blank page curl into flame and turn to ash.

 _____________________________________________________________

* The Lover p 11.

*Wartime Notebooks p 267.