Then news came through of the execution of the Romanov family in a cellar in Ekaterinburg. The streets fell silent. Semenov and Ungern-Sternberg fumed for days and then fell out with each other so badly that they fought a duel on the steps of the Hotel Moderne. It was said that neither man had aimed to kill, since they quickly made up and, without settling their accounts at the Moderne or several of the best restaurants, slipped out of Harbin on a river boat, heading for Khabarovsk and careers as minor warlords in the maritime provinces of eastern Siberia.
In time, all thoughts of opposition to the Bolsheviks lapsed. Buildings sprang up to house the newcomers; first cheap clapboard houses, and then – as the White Russians began to retrieve their money from bank accounts abroad – apartment buildings, mansions in Novy Gorod and dachas in the surrounding countryside. The Harbin Stock Exchange opened its doors again, and a new air of gentility descended upon the city, as money and trade flowed in from Paris, London and Amsterdam, and the White Russians settled in to wait out the Bolshevik ascendancy. Three new daily newspapers were established. Attendances at concerts swelled. The Jewish population, now grown to several thousand, built a new synagogue and a hospital. The streets filled with droshkies carrying gentlemen to houses of assignation, or smartly dressed families to dine at clubs and restaurants, or to theosophical coffee houses or parties on one of the riverboats, and in the hot summer of 1919 a new generation came down to the banks of the Songhua River and bathed themselves in the warm shallows, rowed out to Sun Island with picnic hampers and bottles of vodka and wine, and lay in the grass into the long summer evenings watching the sky slowly darken, and tracing with their fingers the necklaces of stars they had once traced on summer evenings in St Petersburg or Moscow, nestled like diamonds in the same blue velvet case.
It was around this time that a small Chinese girl began to appear in the photographs with Kasimir and Piroshka. My mother did not seem curious about her birth or about how a Chinese child came to be in the charge of two Russian Jews. Neither did I think to question it until I was six or seven, and on the few occasions when I raised the subject I was given a look of incomprehension, as if I had spoken in some foreign tongue. A fingertip would be placed benignly on my lips, and the matter was closed. Clearly our origins were part of a mystery so deep it could not even be formed into a question.
In any case the 1940s in Harbin was no time to be asking such questions. So many other things needed explaining – uprisings, occupation, famine, floods, plague, civil war, my own arrival and then, in 1945, my father’s. To examine matters as remote in time as my mother’s birth meant sending messengers on a long journey to a distant land, and I assume she no longer deemed it worth the effort.
Sometimes, lying beside me in bed at night, she would tell me that if you closed your eyes and looked carefully you would see pictures from your past imprinted on the back of your eyelids, and that one picture could be made to fade into the next, like a magic lantern show. She would help me compose pictures of my day while I lay on the bed, telling me to leave out any bad things I had remembered – a dead dog in the gutter, a cuff from a passing soldier, a bruised knee, a taunt from a school mate. It was many years before it occurred to me that this was how she might have dealt with her earliest memories, how, if she needed, she would deal with anything.
Kasimir and Piroshka treated my mother as a daughter in most respects. She accompanied them to the synagogue on Artilleriskaya on each of the High Holy Days and for bar mitzvahs and other special occasions, and she would often play with the children of other Russian Jewish families. However, there was an understanding that she was not Jewish, and would never be initiated into the faith. Instead, they would ask Wang Taitai, our concierge, to take her to the Temple of Extreme Happiness every year at the time of the temple fair and to teach her to offer incense and prostrate herself and pray to the Buddha for the souls of her unknown and unknowable ancestors.
For the most part I accepted the mystery of my origins. After all it was not uncommon amongst my schoolmates for family trees to be mutilated and twisted out of shape by war, flood, disease, or by the temptation, always present in a railway town, to abandon one’s ties and seek a fortune – or at least an unencumbered poverty – in one of the other boom-towns along the line: northeast to Khabarovsk; east to Vladivostok; west to Irkutsk; south to Port Arthur, and then by ship to Shanghai or Hong Kong.
I satisfied myself with fairy tales. Kasimir and his friends would often talk of the early days with the orchestra in Harbin, when, due to a fire in the opera house, concerts were moved to the arrival hall of the railway station. Sometimes trains would pull in during performances, filling the hall with steam and disgorging their passengers into the audience. At dinner parties, Piroshka often told a story of how, in the days when exiled Russians were still arriving in small numbers, among them artists, writers and musicians, she heard a rustle beside her in the middle of a performance and turned to find that another oboist (a young man from Minsk in a tattered fur coat) had slipped a chair beside hers, oboe in hand, and, quickly glancing at the sheet on Piroshka’s music stand, had joined in. Similarly, she went on, Kasimir had been playing in a quartet which disappeared momentarily into the burst of steam from an arriving train, and emerged magically transformed into an octet, now overshadowed by a stack of luggage. I imagined one of these pieces of luggage – a hatbox, perhaps – unclaimed; and Kasimir opening it to find a small abandoned Chinese infant, my mother, and taking it home to Piroshka. Inside the box there would be a note from Guan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, with instructions – written by one of her thousand hands – to bring the child to the temple once a year so that the Goddess could renew her blessing.
From what I could tell, my mother’s girlhood was happy and largely without incident. She grew up speaking Russian and Chinese, sleeping in a curtained-off section of the bedroom in the third storey apartment overlooking the Club of the Russian Student Society. It was a routine of school and piano lessons, of being taken to concerts and put in the care of old Russian matrons while Kasimir and Piroshka performed. In the spring time there were train journeys to the countryside, passing through fields of poppies and irises and villages where long strands of noodles dangled like giants’ hair from large wooden drying frames, their ends stroking the dust in the breeze. There would be musician friends to visit or some touring soloist in a borrowed dacha, and my mother would roam the fields with the Jewish children and fall asleep on Kasimir’s shoulder on the return journey.
Kasimir and Piroshka frequently entertained visitors – musicians, intellectuals, journalists, women with clothes that smelled of perfume and cigarettes, bearded men with deep bellowing voices, swinging their coat-tails and cigar smells around them as they entered the apartment – and on these occasions my mother was packed off to bed early, if only to make more room in the parlour. She would lie awake listening through the thin walls to every word spoken or sung in the adjacent room as clearly as if she had been lying curled up amidst the dishes and cutlery on the table.
The photographs of the time show a Chinese girl steadily growing taller surrounded on all sides by a revolving cast of Russians, slowly ageing, growing correspondingly smaller, so that her presence somehow explained why it was they had come thousands of kilometres from their homes – to pose with her and be vindicated by her unfolding.
Then in February of 1932 the world changed before my mother’s eyes. Around noon one day a shell was lobbed across the river by a Japanese heavy artillery unit. It spun over Daowai on a gentle crescent, clipped a chimney on its descent to the street, and skittered along the cobblestones like a dog with its ears pinned back, before demolishing a cart filled with vegetables and coming to rest, spinning and steaming, in the middle of an intersection. It did not contain a charge, so there was no explosion. But it did contain a message: stating, simply, that no part of the city was safe for the forces of the Chinese general, Li Du, or for the citizens who harboured them.
My mother and
a school friend were among those who rushed to extricate the terrified horse from a blood-stained tangle of broken wood and harness-leather. Li Du and his army had been quartered in the city for several months, holding back the collaborationist forces even after the rest of Manchuria had succumbed to Japanese occupation. So in February the Japanese committed their own troops, along with tanks, artillery and aircraft. In the days following that first shell, Li Du’s forces fought and lost a few skirmishes and then quietly melted into the countryside.
The Japanese swaggered into the city in a procession led by their mounted officers and by a pair of tanks that seemed ridiculously small and squat, as if they were children’s toys commandeered for the occasion, with grown men in uniform standing at attention in their tiny round turrets. The White Russians watched from their doorways, unsure whether to applaud politely, as if they were exotic performers arriving at a garden fête. To many of them the Japanese were the least of three evils, it being clear that the Nationalists would seize their businesses, while the Communists would hand over the Russian émigrés to the Red Army for repatriation.
The new occupiers quietly but firmly applied a tourniquet to the livelihood of Harbin’s White Russians, Kasimir and Piroshka among them. New laws, concessions and monopolies eased most businesses into Japanese ownership or control. The Russians clung to the China Eastern Railway, which had been their first foothold; but the other foreigners, the British, the Americans, the Koreans, sold out and left.
My mother became aware of the changes in the city during the great flood later in the year. The spring had arrived early, and the rivers thawed quickly and then were filled with melting snow from the mountains to the south. The lower parts of the city soon disappeared beneath the flood water, and the population fled for the higher ground of Novy Gorod. The water rose even further, so that it was waist deep in the Bolshoi Prospekt. My mother had her fifteenth birthday as the waters began to recede. She was sent out on some errand, wading along a narrow street through water up to her thighs, when she encountered a Japanese officer paddling around in a barrel fixed with guy-ropes inside a square crate. The two oars were held in place with bent nails, and the craft was listing to one side and then the other as water sloshed around the bottom of the crate. The man had a thin, almost mournful face, a clipped moustache and round glasses through which portions of his eyes and cheeks were refracted. He was dressed in a linen shirt buttoned up to his chin and a long jacket with pockets down the front like a dresser full of small drawers. An oversized pistol was strapped to his chest. He was not making good progress, but was at least kept dry whereas everyone else was soaked from the waist down.
As she went to pass him, my mother dropped her head, not wanting to stare at the man and his ridiculous vessel. But he quickly manoeuvred in front of her, and blocked her way with an outstretched oar. My mother changed course, her skirt swirling around her thighs; but the man jockeyed his barrel to the left with jerky arm movements, and held out the other oar to block her passage. My mother retreated in fright, and stumbled backwards into a half submerged doorway. The man swung his makeshift craft to and fro across the doorway, fixing my mother with his gaze. When she moved to the left again he moved to block her way; when she moved right he parried, shuffling his crate through the water, leaning this way and that to maintain his balance.
My mother noticed some other people, further down the street, and considered crying out; but then realised that the man seemed to have no intention of harming her physically, only of taking full measure of her with his eyes. He kept her cornered for several minutes, watching her with a gentle mocking expression that my mother could not quite fathom – contempt? amusement? lust? curiosity? After a while, my mother told me, their eyes met and fixed for a while, and then the man abruptly spun his craft around and resumed his clumsy progress along the flooded street.
*
The following year, without warning, the Soviet Union sold the railway to the Manchurian government. Within months twenty thousand railway employees and their families were repatriated, and with this, many of the White Russians lost their employment. The orchestra folded, as did the opera, the music school, most of the restaurants and the newspapers. Many White Russians fled south to Port Arthur, where they queued on the dock for days awaiting steamers to Shanghai. Kasimir and Piroshka stayed on, finding work as music teachers amongst the dwindling Russian community. Perhaps they stayed because of my mother; but perhaps also because they could not contemplate uprooting themselves again. Better to have chosen the ground upon which fate would finally snare them.
The city settled into a weary decadence. Its tree-lined streets and dachas were still charming, and it was still the Paris of the East to its few White Russian inhabitants, but they now littered the boulevards at despondent leisure, congregating by day in family groups, their weekend best slowly fading on their backs: valetudinarians with white canes sniffing the breeze from behind tinted medical spectacles; double-chinned matrons stoic, with nothing better to do than fuss with their grandchildren’s hair; young men dandyish and bored and lamenting the absence of cheap entertainment; old men phlegmatic, sitting by themselves smoking and not saying much. It was the younger women who seemed to suffer the most, enduring a slow, spiralling descent, cushioned at each step by the pawning of jewels or bibelots or a gold tooth relinquished to the brokers off Zhongyang Avenue. It was known that some of them also pawned their virtue, and thereafter, step by step, let slip even that cloudy residue which virtue leaves behind when it is sacrificed to necessity.
My mother would see the White Russians on her way home from school, sitting on park benches like abandoned wreaths around a cenotaph, islands of old Russian torpor amidst rivers of cool Japanese efficiency and Chinese indifference. As the seasons turned their numbers slowly dwindled until the civil guard began to move them on (for their own good, it was explained, since the city’s robber bands soon learned that there were banknotes sewn into the lining of their coats – which they wore even in summer – so as to effect, if necessary, a rapid departure).
The only segment of the Russian population that flourished under Japanese occupation was the Russian Fascist Party of Manchuria, which held its meetings at the Club of the Russian Student Society, across from our apartment on Razyezhaya Street. Posters invited the public to lectures by stern, whiskered gentlemen on ‘The Role of Masonry in the Demise of Russia’, ‘The World Conspiracy of Judeo-Masons’, and ‘An Exposition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. At the top of each poster ran the motto: ‘God. Nation. Labour.’
The Party somehow acquired a three-storey building in the city centre, and the money to place on its roof an illuminated blue swastika which competed on the Harbin skyline with the dome of St Sofia’s and the cross atop the American Baptist Mission. My mother told me she would often encounter small groups of young men on her way to school dressed entirely in black: black caps with a black peak, black tunics, shoulder belts, riding breeches and high boots. At first she took them for unemployed droshky drivers. Then she noticed that on their left arm they wore a band with a black swastika set on a bright orange circle, and above it the image of a double-headed eagle. As she passed they would salute each other by sharply throwing up one arm and shouting, ‘Glory to Russia!’
When she told Kasimir of her first encounter with the Fascists, and asked him why they wore only black and used the same symbol as the one that appeared around the altar at the Temple of Extreme Happiness, he merely closed his eyes and joined his fingertips at the bridge of his nose. My mother waited in silence, and, thinking he was falling asleep, reached out to touch his shoulder. He opened his eyes slowly, and said, ‘This has nothing to do with you.’
She asked the same question of Piroshka, who turned to face her, seemingly unaware that in doing so she was pointing a large knife at my mother’s chest, and replied, ‘Kasimir is right. It has nothing to do with you. What more do you need to know?’
One day several months later, soldiers c
leared the main thoroughfare of the city to allow the Fascist Party to hold a parade, starting by the river bank and ending on the other side of the city where a new chapel had been consecrated to the memory of the two Crown-bearing martyrs, Nicholas II and Alexander Karageorgeovic. The Municipal Government decreed that school children should be given an hour’s reprieve from their lessons to witness the spectacle. My mother stood with her school friends, outside the school gate on Kitaiskaya Street, and watched as a Japanese film crew set up their camera on the roof of a military van parked by the curb with its engine idling.
At the head of the column walked Metropolitan Archbishop Nestor, his long black robes swaying in time with his steps, and his face obscured beneath a grey patrician beard whose tendrils brushed against the three pendants that hung from his neck and clacked against each other amidst the folds of his tunic – one a small icon of Christ and his Mother, the second a large cross embedded with jewels, and the third the double-eagle emblem of imperial Russia. A round mitre of dazzling white linen was set on his head, and a short train of the same material hung down over his shoulder blades, with flaps at the front like spaniel ears. On the front of the mitre a jewelled cross glinted in the sunlight as the Archbishop marked each of his steps with an elaborate staff, itself covered in gold. In the Archbishop’s wake a gaggle of priests in starched white vestments bore between them various emanations of the prelate’s divine aura: a crucifix on a pole, icons attached to red velvet banners with gold tassels, a silver aspergillum, a censer also made of silver, its incense as yet unlit, and a large icon of the Virgin and Child set in ornate gold filigree and surrounded by an arrangement of flowers and greenery.
The Phoenix Song Page 6