Pear Garden

The Pear Garden is both a place of fear and a place of shelter: a secluded orchard marked by a servant’s death, yet also the home where Mr Auslander raises Duckling. Its old pear trees, isolated wooden house, and reputation for ghosts shape a landscape in which the household’s avoidance gives the outsider room to live undisturbed and gives an abandoned child a home.

Setting and Buried History

The garden takes its name from its pear trees, each described as two hundred years old. At its centre stands a little wooden house whose attics the Rong family had used to store opium and medicinal herbs. The building’s past is not merely a matter of age or disuse. A female servant disappeared, first prompting the assumption that she had eloped with a man; later, her badly decomposed body was discovered inside the house. Her death could not be concealed. Every member of the family and its staff learned what had happened.

The discovery changed how people regarded the garden. Ghost stories gathered around it, and people became afraid even to hear its name. Parents threatened misbehaving children with being left there. That fear kept other people away, but Mr Auslander made a home in the very place they avoided. The garden’s isolation is therefore both inherited and practical: it is haunted in the household’s imagination, and that reputation helps secure the quiet in which he lives.

Mr Auslander’s Refuge

Mr Auslander made the garden a seasonal refuge as well as a dwelling. Each year, when the pear trees flowered, he watched the mist-like sprays of blossom and breathed in their intense sweetness, feeling that he had found the place he had been seeking. When the petals fell, he swept them up, dried them in the sun, and stored them inside the building so he could keep their fragrance through the rest of the year. The attempt to preserve the blossom made the garden’s brief spring into something he could revisit: an “eternal spring.”

The flowers also served a practical purpose. When he felt unwell, Mr Auslander brewed tea from them, which settled his stomach and made him feel better. The orchard was not simply picturesque scenery around his home; its flowering, falling petals, and stored fragrance became part of his everyday life. The same place that others associated with a decomposed body and ghost stories offered him beauty, quiet, and a remedy for illness.

A Home for Duckling

Duckling’s first independent journey was a crawl to Mr Auslander’s office in the garden. After that first visit, he came every day, standing silently beneath the pear trees to watch the old man. He had practised standing in a wooden crate and walked earlier than most children, but speech came much more slowly. Past the age of two, when other children were beginning to string sentences together, he could make only one sound, leading people to wonder if he would be mute.

The turning point came during Mr Auslander’s lunchtime nap on a rattan chaise longue. Duckling tugged at his jacket, eyes wet with tears, and called out “Dad … dy!” three times. Mr Auslander understood that the child was trying to call him Daddy. It was the first time Duckling had called to anyone; regarding his own father as dead, he began crying, and the narration links that cry to bringing his father back to life. That day Mr Auslander took him into the Pear Garden to live with him. A few days later, the eighty-year-old climbed a pear tree to hang a swing as a present for Duckling’s third birthday. The orchard thus became the setting not only of their meeting but of their new life together.

The Garden Years Later

Eight years later, pear petals were again beginning to fall when Mr Auslander, moving with tottering steps, carefully worked over the words of a letter to Young Lillie, the son of Old Lillie. He wrote out each evening the lines he had composed during the day, and within a few days had formed the letter. It remained in a drawer for more than a year. When Mr Auslander realized he did not have much longer to live, he took it out and told Duckling to post it. The war had left Young Lillie without a fixed abode, and the letter took a couple of months to reach him. The garden’s recurring blossoms frame this act of preparation and delayed communication, tying its seasonal cycle to the old man’s approaching death.

When Young Lillie finally entered the garden, several days of rain had stopped, leaving the buildings washed clean and deep, squelching mud underfoot. He saw no other footprints; webs hung empty, and spiders were rebuilding near the doorway. Smoke from the chimney and the sound of chopping were the signs that the place was inhabited. Inside, Duckling was cutting a sweet potato while a few grains of rice bobbed in boiling water. He was calm at the unexpected visitor’s arrival, returning to his work as if an absent grandfather—or perhaps a dog—had come back. A medicine chest left from the building’s former use, a table, and a director’s chair furnished the room; an open volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica lay on the table. Duckling nodded when Young Lillie asked whether he was reading it. This encounter presents the garden not as an empty haunted house but as a working home: modest, isolated, and inhabited by a child whose quiet presence carries forward Mr Auslander’s life there.