Item: a grandfather clock, running smoothly if somewhat previous, in dark and gold-leafed wood with a fine, painted face. The panel door is open and the pendulum is visible as it makes its long, slow strokes from left to right and back again, producing a steady and undeniable tock tick noise in defiance of convention. This tock tick also reassures me that the person on the sofa is alive and not dead, because her northernmost foot tock ticks along with it from time to time, and then returns to a state of rest.
Item: one desk and chair, both liberally covered in cake crumbs and paper. The desk is functional rather than impressive, and surmounting the piles and stacks of letters and drawings is a single sheet of blank paper and a pencil. Mister (Master) Wu does not use a pen for casual work, because where—or maybe when—he comes from, ink is expensive. Thus, the softest of soft leads, because Mister (Master) Wu is writing in Chinese.
Item: an ancient gramophone, literally; not a stereo or a turntable, not a CD player, but a scratched and whistling construction with a chrome arm and a huge flower-shaped horn and a thick, blunt needle making music from brittle black discs which turn at 78 rpm. The entire trick is accomplished mechanically, without electricity or transistors or silicon.
To me, a child of the digital age, this is a great white magic, so awe-inspiring that I forget for a moment to be nervous of Wu Shenyang. It is in any case hard to remember that he is a person of dread solemnity and pomp, because he seems to approach everything as a kind of game. He is even now leaping over to the gramophone to display it in full glory: winding it, picking out an old record by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and grinning widely as he waits for my reaction to his fabulous trick. I am too lost in the crackling perfection to smile, until the record comes to an end and his deft fingers lift the needle away. He drags out from beneath the machine a bag of yet more impossible records and presses them upon me. I leaf through them with aching concern that I will shatter one, and finally play the adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, listening until the very end. Mister (Master) Wu’s gaze lights on my fingers as I lift the needle just as he did, because this thing is too perfect, too carefully preserved and lovingly made, to allow it to be injured by carelessness. And then finally I am looking at the man before me.
Wu Shenyang is tall and thin. He does not look like Buddha, he looks like a ladder in a dressing gown. Time has polished him, abraded him and passed on, leaving him nearly eighty and stronger than a brace of college athletes, though he favours his right leg just a little. His wide, umber-coloured face is not impassive like that of Takagi Sensei, who once visited Mary’s dojo and grunted meaningfully as I launched weak and indicated attacks at a girl from Hosely; despite the bristling brows in shock-silver above his eyes, he is not stern. Wu Shenyang laughs loudly—alarmingly—at inappropriate moments, and seems to take joy in inconsequential things, like the colour of the window putty and the slipperiness of the carpet in front of his desk. The latter he demonstrates to me by standing square in the slick patch and gyrating wildly, waggling his whole body, sliding his slippers on the spot as he shifts his weight rapidly from one to the other and twisting his hips. When he has finished, nothing will do but that I take a turn. I am immediately concerned that he will think I am mocking his game leg, but again I copy his method exactly and he registers his approval by laughing and shouting “Elvis Presley! Graceland!” When he tries to say “rock and roll” he gets into a terrible tangle because his English is, even after many years speaking it, gently accented with his mother tongue—but this also doesn’t worry him in the slightest, and so it doesn’t worry me either. We pass on to further matters of consequence: he likes my trousers, but he thinks my watch is too young for me, because it features a smiling cat whose whiskers indicate the hour and minute. He also thinks I need a new barber, and though loyalty prompts me to defend Ma Lubitsch’s kitchen table cut, I do so in the knowledge that he is right. Wu Shenyang apologises—to me and to Ma Lubitsch. There is a snort from behind the sofa, but I am immune. An elder stranger, without irony, treats me as a being of equal worth—if of lesser experience and discernment in the matter of timepieces. In the course of the watch discussion we compare forearms, and it is established that mine is actually as thin as his, which for some reason is hugely pleasing to him. Only when I explain why I am here—though of course he must know—does he recover his composure. He peers at me gravely and ponders, and I prepare myself for the inevitable, the impossible testing and the sorrowful rejection. He turns to the wall and selects from amid the ducks a short fat sword with a single edge and a sharp point. Holding it carefully in one hand, he removes the sheath and turns to me.
“Tool of war. Very respectable. Man’s work.” He grimaces. “Or you could say, a butcher’s knife! It is very sharp,” says Wu Shenyang, “and very old. Take it and tell me what you feel.” He steps towards me, extending the hilt, and somehow his bad leg slips as he moves across the slick patch of carpet. The Tool of War is launched into the air, slowly rotating around the point where his hand released it, until (I am relieved to notice, though I have not yet had time to move) it points away from me. Wu Shenyang’s body hurtles forward, almost a dive, and I realise that the hilt of the weapon, striking my chest, will propel the blade into him. It is therefore incumbent upon me to move, and I do. The sword’s top edge is blunt, so I stroke it with my right palm, pushing the point outside our circle, and step forward and bend both knees, back straight, to support the old man as he tumbles.
He does not tumble. His bad leg stretches out and takes the weight easily, and the blade, recaptured without fuss, swooshes through the air in a fluid, whirring spiral and returns to the sheath. Instead of his weight falling across my arms and being absorbed—somewhat—by my legs, the barest of contacts bespeaks his passing, and he emerges from the swirl standing by the door. I look down. My feet are spread in what is called a horseriding stance, my arms are extended above them, palms up and bent at the elbow.
“It is called Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain,” Master Wu says after a moment. “Practice.” But it is only when the girl emerges from behind the sofa and with enormous gravity shakes my hand that I realise I have been accepted as a student, and that somewhere, somehow, it all went right.
“Elisabeth is my secretary,” Master Wu says, without a hint of laughter. “She is quite stern, but as long as you are well behaved, you will get along fine.”
And so it proves. Elisabeth is a small blonde person who rarely speaks, but she orders the arrangements of the House of the Voiceless Dragon with the absolute certainty which is the preserve of ladies of that age, and she studies the forms with the other students and lives on the couch because her mother is too busy to take care of her. Master Wu is utterly obedient to her tyranny and she, in turn, takes care to exercise her power with great subtlety and discretion and even—amazingly—mercy. And sometimes, when Master Wu is lonely or homesick or simply tired, she makes spiced apple cake or Char Siu Bao, and we all eat them together, which helps. Together, because somehow or other I have been adopted again, and now I must split my time between Gonzo and Master Wu.
Voiceless Dragon is taught every morning and evening at seven, and at weekends all day, and students come when they can and stay for at least an hour. During the week, Master Wu composes calligraphy and reads a great many books, so that he knows a great many higgledy-piggledy things about a great many subjects, and some of these things are useless and some are not, but almost all of them find their way into the lessons. Thus along with the Elvis Walk, we have Lorenz Palace Step (mathematical gong fu) and Vetruvian Fist (da Vinci gong fu), and—until Elisabeth intervenes—Fallopian Tube Arm (the name culled from a diagram in my biology textbook, chosen for the shape of the elbow in the final posture, but rather alarming). I study whenever I can, and for some reason however much time I waste when I should be doing homework, my school grades go up rather than down through my association with Master Wu. I worry at first that Gonzo will be resentful of my absences, but he is b
usy with other matters, and certain of his activities require personal space.
In March, Master Wu has an unwelcome visitor, a man called Lasserly who travels all the way from Newport. Lasserly is a forceful person with a big, florid head. His arms are very thick, and he smells of old canvas. He wants to learn the Secrets. Every student of any martial form knows about the Secrets. They are rumoured and scorned across the world. Students are encouraged by some teachers to believe that knowledge of the Secrets will allow a practitioner to defeat age and death, hold his breath for hours on end, and project his spirit out of his body to smite his opponents like a Flash Gordon ray gun. Other masters, more down-to-earth or more honest, aver that the Secrets are symbolic, representing way stations on the journey of the self, or particularly important stylistic elements for the advanced student. Master Wu tells Lasserly that there are no Secrets.
“Come on,” Lasserly says. “Of course there are.”
No, Master Wu says gently, really, there aren’t.
“You know things,” Lasserly says.
That is undoubtedly true. And almost certainly, Master Wu allows, he knows things—even gong fu things—which Lasserly does not. But he doesn’t feel inclined to talk about these things with Lasserly, because Lasserly is somewhat abrasive and even rude, and Master Wu has nicer people to spend time with.
“Well, okay then. Let’s fight instead.”
This is preposterous, on the face of it. Lasserly outweighs Master Wu by a hundred pounds, and his hands are thick with calluses from long practice.
No, Master Wu says after a minute or so of silence. No point.
Lasserly walks out. On his way, he puts his immense finger on my chest. I feel the solidity of him, his body lined up behind the touch. He could channel his whole weight through that finger, probably punch it right through me. I shouldn’t have let him get that close.
“You’re wasting your time,” Lasserly snarls. “This guy doesn’t know any Secrets.” And he walks out, slamming the door so that the china ducks wobble against the plaster.
We practise in silence. Master Wu looks very sad.
On the night of this dark day, when Master Wu has finished wrapping himself around his third slice of apple cake, and is contemplating the advisability of wrapping himself around a fourth, Elisabeth is moved to ask him about Lasserly. The question starts as a curiosity, but by the time she has finished asking it her voice has risen because she cannot hold in her fury any longer, or her shame.
“Why didn’t you fight him?” And then she hears her own question and is abashed.
Master Wu shrugs. “Mr. Lasserly wanted to know if I knew Secrets,” he says. “He wanted to fight me so that he could find out. And now he thinks he knows the answer. He knows that I was so absolutely sure of which way it would go that I didn’t want to fight him.”
“But he thinks he would have won!” And this, in the end, is the heart of the matter, because in Lasserly’s certainty our own is eroded.
“Oh, goodness me,” says Master Wu, with vast sincerity, “I didn’t mean for him to have that impression at all!” He opens his eyes very wide, as if realising for the first time how it must have looked. “Oh dear! I am so clumsy! Do you think I should call him and tell him that I would have beaten him because he has stiff legs, moves like a cow and tenses his shoulders? But,” says Master Wu happily, “he didn’t leave a number. Well, never mind.” And he laughs. “There are no Secrets,” he says, “but there are lots of things I don’t feel like telling someone like Mr. Lasserly. That’s not how you keep Secrets at all—not,” Master Wu says, with great delight, “that there are any.”
“Are there? Secrets?”
“Secrets?” Master Wu says, as if he’s never heard of any such thing. Elisabeth looks at him sternly.
“Yes,” she says. “Inside-the-door. Inner Teachings.”
“Oh,” says Master Wu, “those Secrets.” And he smiles.
“Those Secrets,” Elisabeth repeats a moment later, when Wu Shenyang’s eyes once again roam in the direction of the apple cake, and she realises that the expression of deep division on his face relates to it, and not to the arcana of the chi.
“You mean like the Internal Alchemies? The Iron Skin Meditation and the Ghost Palm Strike?”
The Iron Skin makes a warrior immune to physical weapons; the Ghost Palm passes through solid matter—it cannot be avoided or deflected. I have seen them in movies. I did not know that girls watched those sorts of movies.
“Yes,” says Elisabeth.
“Well, no,” says Master Wu, “there aren’t really any of those.”
This is what he tells everyone who asks, and everyone asks sooner or later. Master Wu has few students, but some of them have students of their own, and one or two of those also have students, spread out across the globe in a great tree of tuition and discovery and experimentation and instruction, but the root is here in Cricklewood Cove, and here it is that every student of whatever level eventually comes to meet Master Wu. Each generation of student is supposed to acknowledge a kind of family relationship with the ones around—we have Voiceless Dragon elder uncles and aunts from Eastbourne to Westhaven, and countless brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. Some are brash and some are deferential and almost all of them, when they come here, are looking for a saint or a warrior, or a demi-god wrapped in mysteries, and Master Wu takes care to relieve them of that illusion in the most painless way.
“No magic,” he tells them stoutly. “No Secrets! No ‘inside the door.’ The truth is not hidden. It is simple. Just very difficult—but I am stubborn!” The laugh, too big for him, and then a little grin, just for you: “And I am lucky! I started early,” by which he means that his father whispered the training songs over his crib in Yenan.
“No,” Master Wu says now, “there are no Secrets. None at all. Would you like me to teach you one?”
“One what?”
“A Secret.”
“You said there weren’t any.”
“I will make one up for you. Then the next time someone asks, we can tell them we do know Secrets after all. Although it might make Mr. Lasserly very cross if he ever found out.” This fearful drawback clearly does not alarm Master Wu at all. He ponders. “Okay,” says Master Wu, after a moment, “a story and a Secret. Are you ready?”
We nod.
“Once upon a time,” Master Wu says, “in the days when your mothers’ mothers were young and attractive and before the wireless carried the voice of England to the corners of the world, there was a boy who could hear the sea from a thousand miles away. He could stand in the dry mountains and hear the sound of breakers on the beach. He could sit with his eyes on the mountains and listen to the storms crashing against high cliffs he had never seen. The salt water was in his veins, and in his heart.
“It made him very bad at many things. He was a bad farmer, a bad hunter, a bad cobbler and a very bad musician, because the noise distracted him and made him play the notes at the wrong time, and in the wrong place—and worse, when he played false, everyone else got drawn into the great ebb and flow of the sea and even the cheeriest music slowed down and sounded like a funeral song: deep, long breaths trailing away into nothing and then rising up again like tears.
“You might think he’d be unpopular, but he was a good-natured boy and his people were good-natured too, and as long as he worked hard and didn’t break things very often, they were happy with him. He moved in a graceful, liquid way, stepping from one foot to the other and back, in and out, back and forth, but of course not every shape in the world lends itself to someone who walks like a rocking horse, so even though his touch was light and his grip was strong, he snapped the ends of things or jostled people from time to time. It balanced out, maybe. In the morning, he worked with his father making things out of leather—his father had set aside a place in the workshop where he could sway without knocking anything over—and in the afternoon he worked with his uncle making bread, which doesn’t care if you roll it
and twist it like seaweed on the beach. In the evening he sat and he closed his eyes until he could feel the spray washing over him and he breathed in time to the waves hitting the rocky cliffs he had never seen. And always, always, at dawn, he and his father and his uncle and all their family—even the women, which was most unusual—practised their gong fu together, because they knew they would have to fight one day, somehow. And of all of them, the young man trained the hardest and studied most deeply, because his patience was like the sea which whispered in his head.
“One day, a great master of gong fu came to the town. He was a fat man, and a mercenary. A soldier for hire, without an employer, and that is a dangerous thing. There were many great masters then, and some of them were very great and some of them were only a little bit great and some perhaps were only great as a courtesy. This one was of the middle ground: he was quick like a cat, but not like lightning; he was strong like a river ox, but not like a mountain bear or a giant; he was clever, but not wise, and he enjoyed his strength and his speed and his power over other people. And so this great master, who was really not a nice man, grew very drunk in the village saloon and laid about him with a broken spar of wood, and he struck the owner of the saloon between the eyes and cracked his skull so that he died, and then he set about the customers and the saloon owner’s family too.
“So the leatherworker and his brother—our young man’s father and uncle, you remember—went in to meet him and tell him to behave himself like a master and not a thug, and he cast his eyes downwards and acted most contrite, then when they relaxed, he knocked them head over heels out through the door with his broken spar. The young man’s father had a bruise on his head and his uncle had crossed eyes and was bleeding from one ear. And so the young man, who had never been in a real fight before, walked into the saloon and told this old, accomplished master of gong fu that he was a small man, a miserable creature, a weak, drunken oaf with no conversation and no chance with any lady he did not pay for. And while the master was still staring at him, he added many other things less polite which were perhaps unfair, but still most efficacious in attracting the master’s attention. And so, they fought.”