The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  That night we gathered around the single light bulb that hung from the ceiling, my mother sitting cross-legged on the kang, the heated brick bed, making pencilled notes in a Russian medical journal, me and my father sharing the narrow table, he poring over papers while I practiced my characters, with the toe of one shoe hooked under the table leg to stop it wobbling. After a while my father rose and took a record from the cabinet under the gramophone. ‘Tonight we will have Yuji Nomandi,’ he announced to my mother, ‘and the Brotherly Love Orchestra.’

  ‘What are they playing?’ the mother asked without looking up, as my father wound up the spring and set the needle to the spinning shellac disc. He said nothing, but as the opening chord sounded my mother nodded to herself. ‘Si-bei-li-ya,’ she said, ‘Very good.’

  As the music played my father took one of the thin paper forms from his pile, turned it over, and began to sketch something on it. Out of the corner of my eye I watched a geometrical figure – a dodecahedron – take shape on the page. Aside from the Party, music and mathematics were my father’s passions. To his eye the universe in its vastness and its detail was one continuous feat of mathematical engineering, and music, he would often tell me, is merely a particularly beautiful branch of mathematics. His small library included translations of Euclid (the one the Emperor Kangxi commissioned from the Jesuits who were trying to convert him), Pascal’s Selected Works and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (purchased during Russell’s lecture tour of China in the 1920s). And throughout his daily sojourns he would see around him, either hidden or in plain sight, a world of geometrical forms, symmetries and series, combinations and proportions, progressions and regressions, so much mathematics on the world’s surface there to be observed and understood. The curves of an arch as he passed beneath it, the gardens of frost that grew on a puddle by the roadside, the games that light and shadows played on factory chimneys as the sun set, the rising and falling pitch of train whistles, such things sent him into quiet, breathless contemplation, holding himself motionless as one may do when a tiny bird alights nearby, in the hope of prolonging the opportunity to view its plumage close up, before it flits away. What he was seeking in these moments, I learned, was some insight into the unseen numbers beneath the skin of things, beneath the world’s skin, that substance which gives it shape and form, and he was confident that he would in time discern it, unless someone first tugged at his sleeve and brought him back into the world of appearances, into the world that mathematics sustained.

  He told me once that as a youth he had been so mesmerised by watching the receding railway lines from the back of a train that he had packed his things into a bag, taken leave of his parents and siblings, and purchased a ticket to China’s northernmost province, so as to resolve the question of whether parallel lines did in fact meet at infinity. This was fanciful, I knew, but the idea enchanted me. A young man riding a steam train from his home in Shanxi Province, seated up front in the engine, having bribed the driver with an offering of food, eyes fixed forward watching for a glimpse of infinity in the cold, blank wheat fields of Manchuria.

  That night, as Sibelius played in the background, I put down my pen and watched my father complete his drawing, and when it was finished whispered to him, ‘What are you thinking, Papa?’

  ‘Thinking?’ he said, and then smiled and reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and match-book. ‘Yes, Magou, I suppose you are right,’ he said as he lit up. ‘To the untrained eye I was merely drawing, but in fact I was thinking. I was thinking that all shapes are made up of intersecting planes and the spaces between, that planes are like walls, except you can pass through them easily, indeed’ – and here he swept his hand across his body, dragging a trail of smoke – ‘indeed, merely by doing this my hand passes through planes almost without number, wan cheng wan.’

  ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand,’ I said, screwing up my eyes. ‘That makes one yi, is that right?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, but you miss my point,’ he went on, ‘Each plane is only one particle thick, so you may witness me squeezing those planes, ten million, perhaps a hundred million of them, into a tiny space.’ He raised both hands and mimed the compression of a span of air into an imaginary box, pressing it down onto the table, squaring its imaginary sides, and then holding up his thumb and forefinger with the smallest sliver of air between them. ‘A particle is the smallest thing the mind can imagine; and that is all it is: an act of the imagination, an idea in the mind, a spider’s web inside your head. That is why you can walk through a sheet of particles.’ His hand began to shake, but I saw him clamp tight the tendons in his arm as he went on. He inclined his head towards me and lowered his voice, glancing quickly across at my mother, who was absorbed in her medical journal. ‘You see, it is a simple thing, my little illness, my troublesome friend. At first I feared it was like a wolf roaming at large within the garden of my mind, but now I know it is merely a harmless spider. Yes, a spider has found a way into my head. I expect it crawled into my mouth when I was sleeping. So here is today’s lesson: remember always to sleep with your mouth tightly shut so you do not acquire a little spider like mine, who spins his little webs behind my eyes when I am not looking, so that I see walls where there is only a doorway. When I touch them, the webs disappear, since each has only the strength of one thought. And, I ask you, how strong can a single thought be?’

  I paused for a moment, and then an answer – the answer – came into my mind. ‘Mao Zedong’s thoughts are stronger than iron,’ I recited.

  ‘Indeed, that is true.’ My father fell silent, and I felt a wave of embarrassment as I realised I had contradicted him. His eyes began to wander around the room as if following the flight of an insect. ‘This shape worries me, however,’ he said, stabbing at his drawing with his finger, ‘as it once worried Pythagoras and Leibniz and Poincaré, so I am in good company. A dodecahedron is the largest of the perfect solids. You see, every face is a five-sided polygon, and at every corner three such polygons meet. What Pythagoras discovered, to his great consternation, is that no larger perfect solid is possible. Can you imagine that? Hexagons cannot fit together like this, you’d need to add a different shape – a square or a triangle – to complete the solid; and the same is true of octagons or anything larger. So this is as close as mathematics can get towards a perfect sphere using whole numbers, a shape made out of pentagons – close enough, you might think, but for a science as precise as mathematics it is an embarrassment, an offence. And that is what worried Pythagoras, and after him Leibniz and Poincaré.’

  ‘What worried them?’

  ‘That the sphere itself was inaccessible, that the largest of perfect solids was still so far away from a perfect sphere. They say it is what drove Pythagoras to madness.’ He laughed and turned away. ‘But this is not important for you. You have already learned today’s lesson.’ He touched my lips with his finger and told me to finish my page of characters quickly, as the electricity would soon go off for the night. And the moment the words left his lips, as if by his instruction, the darkness indeed closed around our little household with a faint thud. My mother reached for the book of matches at her side and one sparked into life and then described an arc towards the paraffin lamp on the shelf above the bed. She lit the wick and then brought the lamp to the table. Both of my parents returned to their reading, and gazing up at the ceiling I became aware of the yellow swatches of light flung up against the walls and ceiling, and then of our shadows between them, like flames in negative, three dark angels – our larger selves – suspended over us, shaking from side to side as the flame sputtered, mutely gesturing to one another, although I could not tell if it was with rage or laughter.

  ‘When will you get us a generator?’ my mother asked, without looking up. ‘We have important work to do in the evenings, as does the Deputy Mayor across the courtyard. How does this darkness help achieve socialism?’

  ‘Our work is no more important than that of any factory-hand,’ my father
replied. ‘It shall not happen.’

  My mother was silent, and she turned her face into the shadow so as to hold her medical journal up to the lamplight, while in the corner Yuji Nomandi and the Brotherly Love Orchestra played on.

  *

  When I first met him, my father and his comrades had newly liberated our city from the Japanese and their collaborators, and while the communist forces pressed south to liberate the rest of Manchuria my father was chosen to stay behind and became in the course of one day our mayor, party secretary, chief of police, judge, jailer – commissar, in fact, of everything. These duties left little time for family, so for months he would arrive infrequently, unannounced, at our apartment, shadowed by Wen who squatted on his haunches against the wall while my father perched on the edge of a chair, sipping loudly on a glass of tea, rapidly interrogating my mother on the progress of his daughter’s studies and general well-being. If, when his questions finished, my mother had anything to ask him she did so immediately, because within seconds he would rise to his feet, summon his companion and resume city business as they descended the stairs.

  It was during that time that he acquired the nickname Tie Lu – Iron Lu, the pun inevitable, as tie lu is Chinese for ‘railway’ or literally ‘iron road’ and my father, whose surname was Lu, had been before the war an engineer for the China Eastern Railway. But even so the title was deserved. My father refused to show either favour or mercy to the undeserving. Everyone knew that Iron Lu would calmly enforce upon others (as he did on himself) the duty to make personal sacrifices for the good of the masses. Under his rule, food was rationed, entire neighbourhoods dragooned into building flood-banks, lazy officials demoted and humiliated, compradors and capitalists stripped of their wealth and sent to labour camps, curfew-breakers, criminals and traitors to the Party summarily executed. His impartiality, it was said, enabled his justice to be swift and brutal, if at times premature.

  It soon became known in the neighbourhood that I was Iron Lu’s daughter. On the street people would talk behind their hands as I passed, and when, at school, I would answer a question in class the other children would hold their breath until the teacher pronounced my answer satisfactory. I remember once uttering an angry remark, whereupon the room fell silent around me. A girl began to sob quietly, and I felt that, in that instant, I had grown taller and had acquired claws, that I had been transformed into a snow tiger from the forests of the north that had come to live in the city, playing in the streets and the schoolyard dressed as a small child. To be the daughter of Iron Lu meant that if I wanted I could reach out and tear a child’s heart from its chest, and no one would stop me.

  And yet, in those first summers together after the Civil War and after his stroke my father would return from his work and insist that I lie beside him on a bed of newspapers on the dusty flag-stones of our compound and study the night sky. He taught me the names of the planets and constellations, and explained that the universe was an infinite factory filled with every conceivable kind of machine, each with its celestial wheels and pistons, and that we observed its workings from a spinning platform on the edge of one of the smaller, less significant cogs. Then he would play scratchy music on the gramophone with his eyes tightly shut, or read aloud to me in an affected sing-song voice from his well-thumbed book of the Tang poets.

  *

  The morning after my father’s encounter with the door frame my mother and I guided him out onto the street and anxiously watched him get onto his bicycle. ‘You have patients to attend to,’ he said to my mother. ‘I’ll be fine. Go now.’ And he was off, pushing hard with his right foot while his left foot rested unsurely on its pedal.

  My mother pressed my schoolbag into my hands. ‘Follow him,’ she ordered. ‘Make sure he gets there safely.’

  I ran down the street after my father, keeping a safe distance in case he should turn around and notice me. His office was about a kilometre away from our house, on the third floor of the railway station, which temporarily housed the city government while a new town hall was being built. I arrived breathless at the grand entrance to the station and found that my father had already parked his bicycle, and made his way to the front steps where he now stood, like a stone amidst the stream of people flowing through the doorway. After several minutes he turned and, as if he had known I would be there, summoned me with a wave of his hand.

  ‘So what am I thinking now?’ he asked, nodding towards the station entrance.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I will tell you,’ he said.

  He did not answer immediately, but after a moment took my hand and wrote two characters on my palm with his finger: the first an assembly of long verticals and short horizontals – men; the second a simple square – kou.

  ‘Men kou,’ I said. ‘Door mouth.’

  He pointed at the doorway. ‘So now tell me what I am thinking.’

  I turned my eyes to the building in front of us. The twin doors, at least twice the height of the tallest man, were set between two stone columns at the exact centre of the façade. Large arched windows spread out in both directions like the wings of an enormous cormorant, and high above on the cornice a great mast jutted out at an angle and on it the flag of the People’s Republic was tugged this way and that by the morning breeze so that its four bright yellow stars, symbolising the four classes of Chinese society – the peasant, the worker, the bourgeoisie, and the capitalist – ascended and descended in turn amongst its vermilion folds.

  I looked up to the flag, and then back down to the doorway through which flowed a stream of passengers, clerks, ticket-sellers, engineers, welfare officers, administrators, and cafeteria workers. ‘What you see,’ I said, ‘is the mouth of the building.’ I traced the arch of the entrance in the air with my finger.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘And the building is swallowing all these people,’ I said, indicating them with a broad sweep of my hand, ‘it is sucking them into its great big mouth.’

  ‘Very good,’ my father answered. ‘Hungry for passengers and workers, the China Eastern Railway sucks in a string of people like one unbroken noodle, a sign, incidentally, of good fortune and longevity. And as they cross the threshold all of these people are eaten up, they are like numbers absorbed into the immense equation that is the China Eastern Railway, they become a part of the railway, just as a bolt or a screw or a lump of coal is a part of the railway.’

  With that he squeezed my hand and turned me by the shoulders in the direction of my school. ‘Never forget,’ he whispered in my ear, ‘you and I have learned to walk through walls. It is a gift few people have.’ And he gave me a firm push to set me on my way. I took a few steps forward, but then turned around and watched him approach the doorway, holding out his hand to touch the doorframe. And I imagined – perhaps I saw – that the doorway was a solid wall until the moment he touched the surface of the stone, and that at his touch it opened to receive him and then closed up as he drew his foot across the threshold.

  *

  Years later it occurred to me that I took from that incident a lesson very different from what my father intended. I became convinced that things were there to be known, to be possessed by the mind so long as you pushed beyond their appearances; that another, more real world lay beyond the walls that others saw, and that my father and I were singularly equipped to see into that secret heart of things. At one time my father – the engineer, the party boss, the amateur mathematician – might have agreed with me, but I now see that his passage through our front door that evening taught him a different lesson, a lesson about the eye’s unsure attachment to the world of things, and the mind’s unsure attachment to the eye. I understand now that for him it was the beginning of an education in doubt.

  2. Harbin 1937

  Imagine a cityscape, a far northern city crouched like a sleeping tramp beneath a yellow sky at dawn on a morning in early spring. The low sun picks out a jumble of shapes from amongst the roof-tops – triangles, oblongs, rh
ombuses – harlequin lozenges of light and dark with edges ruled pencil-sharp. Towards the left, standing by itself, is the onion-shaped cupola of the cathedral of St Sofia. Migratory birds fly over it in formation heading north to the Arctic shores. A veil of sandy light covers the whole scene, somehow intensifying the extreme cold, making it crisp and astringent, minutely sharp, a vapour of tiny blades drawn through the nostrils onto the back of the throat. The city holds as still as it can to keep this cold at bay, making barely a shuffle under its blanket of silence, under a sky stretched tight like a threadbare awning against the vault of Heaven.

  In the foreground the turning stretch of the riverbank is mostly in shadow. There are dim, blurred forms rising out of the gloom: the prows of lighters or flat-bottomed river-boats, the door of a boat-shed and, in the river itself, the last of the winter ice-floes. And along the front of the embankment there is a collection of twig-like shapes, a colony of the poor and indigent who, swaddled in rags and sacking, lie like musty foetuses in the shelter of the wharves and upturned boats.

  Then the scene comes to life as a young man makes his way clumsily along Zhongyang Avenue. We move in closer. He is perhaps twenty-five years old, with untidy black hair, long Buddha-like ears and a scar that bisects one eyebrow, a fit man with a spare frame, whose clumsiness and panting breath are due entirely to the fact that he has for the last several kilometres been carrying a large gramophone of the kind now found only in antique shops, a varnished wooden box with a handle for winding up the internal spring, a heavy platen calibrated to turn at a constant seventy-eight revolutions per minute, a claw-like spindle and a brass cone shaped like an oversized iris-bloom which now addresses itself awkwardly towards the man’s right ear. We pan out once more to the level of the rooftops and notice immediately that behind this man, beyond the dome of St Sofia’s, a plume of charcoal grey smoke is now rising into the yellow sky and spreading out into a clump of stubby fingers like a harshly pruned rose or a disfigured hand, blackened and burnt.