The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  The city is Harbin, on the banks of the Songhua River in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, a city of some half a million souls – Han Chinese, like my parents, Russian railway engineers, White Russian émigrés (marooned in the North of China after the October revolution almost two decades ago), and a battalion of Japanese soldiers, the enforcers of the Manchukuo puppet regime. The fleeing man is Lu Feng. In three years’ time he will become my father, but on this day he has made his way through Daowai, the Chinese sector of the town, and is following the riverbank west towards Daoli, the city centre. He suspects (rightly as it turns out) that the agents of the puppet government who roused him before dawn are now searching for him, along with his comrades in the underground Communist Party committee. He fears that the safe-houses and rendezvous points have already been betrayed, and that he will be lucky to escape with his life.

  *

  The story of his flight from Harbin was one of the first my father told me. One Sunday morning, I recall, when my mother slept late, he roused me from my narrow cot and told me to get dressed because he wanted us to go to the river to catch some fish. He waited for me in the courtyard of our house with a satchel over his shoulder and his hands grasping the handlebars of his bicycle. His fishing rod and tackle, along with a cone-shaped wire trap, were tied to the carrier, and he beckoned me to follow him through the gate onto the street. I climbed onto the crossbar and we set off. As we rumbled along the cobblestones I could feel my father’s warm breath on my forehead, and several times I turned my face upwards towards his and watched his eyes as they flicked to and fro. The streets were quiet and we glided through the calm morning air for about twenty minutes, passing the railway station and the post office, and coasting down towards the centre of the city. We turned into Zhongyang Avenue, and came immediately upon a gang of men squatting on their heels in a circle in the middle of the road amidst wafts of dust. We swerved to avoid them and slowed to a walking pace as my father guided the front wheel of the bicycle around a litter of broken cobble-stones. Another group of men were working on the road some distance away. They were lightly dressed in grey cotton trousers and jackets, their feet bare and blackened with dust. One or two of them stared at us wordlessly as we passed, but most kept their eyes on the stones they were fitting into place in the road.

  ‘Aha, my good comrades from Xiangfeng Prison,’ my father said, and he bumped the bicycle onto the curb and turned into a gap between two buildings. ‘Best not distract them from their work,’ he said. We rode carefully along a narrow sunless alley, ducking under damp bedding hung out of windows. Wet gravel hissed softly beneath our tyres, and somewhere ahead of us a pair of hands emerged from a doorway to empty a pail of water into the alley. We soon encountered a dog with stumpy legs and a lolling pink tongue so thick and heavy it did not seem able to pull it back into its mouth. It stood square in the middle of the alley and panted up at us as my father edged the bicycle past it, and when we had gathered pace once more it ran after us, escorting us to the end of the alley before turning on its heels, its duty discharged, and trotting back triumphantly to its post to await the next intruder. My father made to turn right and then stopped, extending his heels to the pavement and looking up at the surrounding buildings. ‘Yes, this is the exact place,’ he said. He gently pushed me from the crossbar, got off the bicycle and leant it against a lamp-post. He turned a full circle, registering the row of shops across the street, the factory gates further down towards the river and the old church to our left whose doors and forecourt now overflowed with used lumber. ‘This is indeed the place,’ he said to himself, and stroked his chin several times. ‘That was the British Duck and Chicken Factory,’ he said, pointing to an empty lot, ‘and over there was the American Baptist Mission building.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘On this corner, in 1937, I first met your mother.’ I dutifully studied the uneven flagstones of the footpath where his finger was pointing. ‘If you wish I will tell you the story of how this happened,’ my father said, and he threw his leg over the bicycle and tapped the crossbar. I climbed back up and we pushed out into the street and rode down towards the river.

  *

  It was five a.m. on the morning of 15 April 1937. Lu Feng was asleep in his lodgings in the Daowai district of Harbin when he was awoken by voices in the street outside. He heard his landlord Tan go to the door, and then the commotion as a group of people rushed into the courtyard, asking, ‘Are you Tan Yongshang? Are you? Are you?’ Tan barely had time to answer them before they manhandled him out of the door. Moments later a car started up its engine and moved off down the street.

  As Lu waited in the darkness he heard the intruders ransacking the house, emptying the contents of drawers and cupboards into the central courtyard. Agents of the puppet government, Lu thought, and his heart began to pound, for he was in a small room next to the kang, the heated brick bed where everyone slept in winter, and there was no way he could escape unnoticed. He fumbled in the darkness for his clothes to dress himself, and slipped into the main room. He pushed his hands into his pockets and felt the folded piece of paper, remembering the three characters he had written on it, Wang, Tong, San, to remind himself: Mr Wang. Tongfalong Store. Three o’clock.

  The agents were still searching outside, so he quickly opened the firebox of the kang, thrust the paper into the warm embers, and closed the iron hatch. In due course, the door opened and three agents wearing padded coats and carrying a kerosene lamp pushed his sister, Lu Min, and Tan’s apprentice, An Libai, into the room. Lu sat quietly on the kang as his face was illuminated by the light of the lamp. He thought only of the paper in the firebox, willing it to catch fire and be consumed.

  The agents pushed Lu Min and An Libai onto the kang and demanded to know their names. Lu Feng identified himself as a railway engineer, while Lu Min explained that she worked at the Tianxingfu No. 1 Flour Mill. They had recently moved into these lodgings after theirs had been requisitioned by the Japanese. An Libai had been living in the house for only a few days, he said, having been taken on by Tan as an apprentice carpenter. None of them knew much about their new landlord Tan, they said.

  One of the agents produced a gramophone from Lu’s room, unscrewed the back panel and began to search for suspect material inside. Another agent shuffled through Lu’s collection of records. After half an hour they seemed to tire of their search and withdrew onto the street to talk amongst themselves. A car drew up to the gate and a minute later departed with a crunch of gears. Lu went to the doorway and noted that two of the men had remained outside the house, passing a cigarette between them.

  Lu returned and checked the firebox, satisfying himself that the paper had burned. Then the three of them pressed their heads together in the darkness and planned their next move in whispers. They needed to warn the other party cells about Tan’s arrest and the possibility that he had been betrayed, and they needed to contact Mr Wang, a senior cadre who was due to arrive in the city that afternoon from the Soviet Union, to tell him to stay in the countryside until they could assess how much the authorities knew. Their tasks agreed, they arranged to rendezvous by the river at dusk. Lu reassembled the gramophone, said farewells to his sister and his comrade and left the house. As he had anticipated, one of the agents stopped him and asked where he was going so early. ‘You have damaged my gramophone,’ he said, ‘so before I go to work I need to take it to my friend on Anguo Street to get it repaired.’ The agent shrugged his shoulders and let him pass.

  It was the middle of April, but the temperature was still below freezing, and a heavy frost had formed overnight. Lu’s leather-soled shoes slipped on the glazed surface of the cobblestones, and he had to twist his body so as to break the fall of the gramophone. Tightening his grip, he continued on towards Zhongyang Avenue, walking as fast as he could without breaking into a run.

  Zhongyang Avenue was still in darkness, like the floor of a deep canyon, with falling light reflected weakly from the windows of the upper stories of the grand houses and magasi
ns. Lu passed the foyer of the Hotel Moderne where the doorman was yawning as he idly brushed dust from his epaullettes. Lu tried to conceal the gramophone, shifting it from his left arm to his right, but its sharp corners cut into the top of his hip, so he shifted it back again.

  As he passed the Palace Cinema, Lu peered into the darkened lobby. There were two billboards visible, one in Cyrillic script and the other in more familiar characters, but in a sequence that was unintelligible to Lu. A Japanese programme, Lu thought, and as he saw himself reflected in the glass doors of the cinema he caught a glimpse of a face at the window of the building behind him. He lowered his head and hurried on, sensing that all around him the people of the city were rising from their beds and pulling on their clothes and peering through their curtains at the new day. He had to hurry, for with his arms thrown around a gramophone he could not help being a memorable sight. Yet he did not break into a run for fear of falling on his face and attracting even more attention.

  As Lu turned into Anguo Street he met a tide of workers tramping silently off to their shifts at the Flour Mill or the Soy Bean Oil Mill or the British Chicken and Duck Factory. He felt himself doubly conspicuous, travelling against the current and with a strange load held out in front of him. Stepping into an alley, he found the house where Feng Cean lived, and knocked several times on the heavy wooden door. No reply. Stepping back he looked up at the single high window, but it was obscured by a pull-down blind. Pinned to the door of the adjacent house was a poster: ‘Glory to Russia!’ it read in large Cyrillic print, and underneath, ‘God. Nation. Labour.’

  He made his way back to Anguo Street and to a small park where food stalls were set up each morning for breakfast. After looking without success for Feng Cean and Ai Fenglin amongst the customers, Lu bought a bowl of hot soy milk and a knobbled stick of dough-bread and found a space at one of the tables. He kept his eyes cast downwards, aware of the steamy breath of the other patrons, and the occasional dry smell of a cigarette. The man next to him read through a copy of the Great Northern News, folding and re-folding it. When he finished, he threw the paper on the table in front of Lu. ‘Does it eat much?’ the man asked, indicating the gramophone, and then left, chuckling to himself. Lu picked up the paper, but did not read it. He was already imagining that agents were spreading out amongst the morning workers asking after a man with a scarred eyebrow carrying a gramophone. He paid for his breakfast and returned to Feng Cean’s house, where, not knowing what else to do, he sat on the doorstep and read the newspaper.

  After half an hour, Lu felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Feng’s landlord, an old Cossack whom Lu had met on several occasions, but whereas he remembered him as a tub of lard with stubby pink hands and a fleshy face lined with cold, velvety sweat, the man whose hand now rested on Lu’s shoulder resembled a deflated balloon stretched over a skeleton. His eyes were yellowed, as if stained by dye, and his hand trembled on Lu’s collar. Lu now recalled Feng telling him that his landlord had fallen on hard times, losing first the brothel he ran (the Japanese authorities had given the building to a brothel-keeper of their own) and then his wife, who had died suddenly from heart failure.

  The pair spoke briefly in Russian with a sprinkling of Chinese and numerous hand gestures. Both Feng Cean and Ai Fenglin had been arrested, the landlord explained. He invited Lu in and showed him into their room. A drying frame was suspended from the ceiling and from it an old overcoat turned to and fro on a wooden coat-hanger like a hanged man. There were two upturned beds, and clothes, books and personal items were strewn about the floor.

  ‘They are both good men and have done nothing wrong,’ Lu told the Cossack, not sure if he could comprehend. ‘I will go to the police and get them released.’ The old man nodded vaguely, and moved about the ransacked room picking up and examining the scattered belongings of his tenants. Lu excused himself and left.

  Back on the street, he gathered his thoughts. If both Tan and Feng had been betrayed the agents must have found a source from within the party. He must warn all party members to flee, but most importantly he needed to intercept Mr Wang before he walked into a trap. Wang was due in the city mid-afternoon, so Lu decided to pawn his gramophone first so as to put some money in his pocket for the journey ahead.

  He turned the corner into Anguo Street and immediately collided with a young woman walking towards him at speed clutching a large book to her chest. The pair lurched together, as if in a drunken waltz, and the woman’s book fell to the pavement while she instinctively grasped a corner of the tumbling gramophone. In a dance of hands and feet the weight of the gramophone passed from Lu to the woman and back again as they lowered it in a series of jolts towards the ground. Lu found himself on one knee with his hand beneath the box, holding on to the woman’s ankle. She was sitting on the pavement clutching one side of the gramophone and with her other hand holding the sound cone into whose darkness she peered.

  Lu apologised for his clumsiness, setting the gramophone to one side and offering his hand to help the woman to her feet. Her book had fallen open at a diagram of the human arm with annotations in Russian naming all the muscles and tendons. Lu handed the book back. ‘Anatomiya?’ he said. The woman nodded and pointed at the gramophone at her feet. ‘Muzyka?’ she said, almost laughing. Lu smiled quietly, picked up the gramophone, and continued on his way.

  *

  At this point my father’s story stopped. We had arrived at the banks of the Songhua River and turned upstream onto the embankment. There were people scattered along the promenade enjoying the morning sun – old men ambling along with their rhythmic duck-like gait, a young Jewish man with a tall black hat and a monocle reading a book, a group practising tai ji chuan, small children in crotchless pants chasing each other like spinning dust-devils under the sleepy gaze of grandmothers.

  ‘Is that the end of the story?’ I asked, after a while.

  ‘That is the story of how I first met your mother,’ he said. ‘Sadly it was not more romantic. We did not meet again for many years, and then the war separated us once more, as you know.’

  ‘She was studying medicine,’ I said. ‘And you were taking our gramophone to the pawnshop.’

  He nodded. ‘From where I have now miraculously redeemed it,’ he said. ‘I was sure it would have been lost after all these years.’

  I asked him to tell me more, but at that moment we encountered a team of young people singing a revolutionary song as they repaired a section of the flood bank with picks and shovels. ‘There’s Iron Lu,’ one of them said, and hailed my father with a generous stiff-armed wave. The entire team crowded around us as we drew to a halt amongst them, and my father asked how the work was going and what their names were and where they were from, and the young people competed to answer his questions and laugh merrily at his jokes. ‘Have you eaten?’ one of the women asked me, and before I could answer she had reached into her pocket and produced a piece of dough-bread which she held out to me. ‘No need, no need,’ my father said, ‘Comrade Lu’s daughter must not get fat. Preserve your own strength.’ And with that he began to sing the next verse of their song and pushed off again as they took their cue, bursting into song once more and reaching for their shovels.

  We continued up river for a while. I clung to the handlebars and watched the birds skimming the surface of the water and the curling smoke of fishermen’s fires on the opposite bank. Then without warning my father clutched the brakes and I lurched forward.

  ‘We stop here,’ he said. I hopped onto the ground and turned to face the river. He parked his bicycle against a linden tree and then we sat down together on a stone wall on the riverbank. He had not unhitched his fishing gear from the bicycle, and showed no interest in it. Instead, he cleared his throat and proceeded with his story.

  *

  Lu made his way back to Daoli. The rendezvous with Mr Wang was to take place outside the Tongfalong Department Store. All he had been told was that Old Mrs Chang – the only person who knew Mr Wang by sight – was to
meet him and take him to the safe house near the cotton-fluffing factory. He did not know where she lived, so his only hope was to intercept her as she approached the rendezvous point. This would not be a simple matter, since the Tongfalong Store was at the intersection of four streets and there were numerous alleys by which someone could approach. The street was full of shoppers, Japanese soldiers and workers threading their way between cars and horse-drawn carts. Lu stopped next to a blind hawker who sat cross-legged on the footpath, plaintively calling out ‘Guar zi, gua-aa-ar zi, guar zi’ as he measured handfuls of melon seeds into twists of paper. Lu bought a pack of seeds and surveyed the scene slowly as he cracked several in his front teeth. He spied the two men in padded coats standing by the entrance to the store, and another across the street squatting in a doorway pretending to consult a newspaper. He noted how the grinder on the corner held himself unnecessarily upright and alert as he pumped his treadle and called out, ‘Knives, scissors, razors.’

  Lu checked the clock on the stock exchange building. Ten minutes before Mr Wang was due, and no sign of Mrs Chang. He walked to and fro amongst the crowd looking for her, fearing that he was drawing attention to himself. He noticed an old Russian dwarf who was shining shoes in a doorway and slipped onto his stool. The Russian looked surprised to have a Chinese customer who was not obviously a comprador or official of the puppet government; nevertheless, he spat on Lu’s modest leather shoes and began work. After five minutes there was still no sign of Mrs Chang. Lu entertained a vain hope that he might identify Mr Wang himself, but there were any number of men on the street who could have been him. The dwarf tapped Lu on the foot, told him he was finished and snapped his fingers. Without looking down Lu told him he wanted them to shine even brighter and promised to pay him double. The man shrugged his shoulders, summoned more spittle from the back of his mouth and started again.