The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  At a respectful distance a detachment of Cossacks, dressed in the uniforms of various regiments, nudged their horses forward, trailing three-coloured banners and flags, and these were followed in turn by a contingent of cadets in khaki uniforms, marching three abreast. The cadets were attempting a goose step, but kept losing their timing and having to regroup, hounded by a parade sergeant who hissed between his teeth the commands he clearly wished he could shout. He seemed uncomfortably aware of the calm orderliness of the Blackshirts that followed him, those sleek young men in riding breeches, shoulder belts and peaked caps, chins defiantly jutting, boot heels thudding into the ground, each primly restraining a smile.

  From time to time, prompted by calls from onlookers, a Blackshirt would salute and cry out, ‘Glory to Russia’. On their heels came a cloud of young people from the Avangard, the Union of Young Fascists; then a column of middle-aged women from the Women’s Fascist League in black skirts, white blouses and swastika armbands; and at the rear a small group of visiting Fascists from various countries – the United States, Britain, Egypt, Korea – all wearing their national costumes under their swastika armbands. After the column had passed, the film crew quickly dismantled their tripod and stowed it in their van before racing off down a side street, apparently intending to loop around to another vantage point further along the route and capture the whole procession again.

  The day after the parade the newspapers announced with banner headlines the return of Ataman Grigorii Mikhailovic Semenov from years of sojourning in the United States and Japan, and within a week he was officially declared by the Japanese authorities to be ‘head of the Russian emigrants in Manchukuo’. There was a photograph of him in the newspaper meeting the new Emperor of Manchukuo, ‘Henry’ Pu Yi, also installed by the Japanese. ‘Greetings to the Leaders of a New Mankind – Mussolini, Hitler, Semenov,’ the Fascist newspaper announced.

  On hearing the news, Kasimir and Piroshka closed the curtains of the apartment and sat in the gloom. My mother arrived home at the same time as a couple of family friends, and, after a murmured greeting, they ascended the stairs together. The adults sat around the edges of the darkened room, listening to the ticking of the clocks above the mantelpiece and saying little. Someone started to talk about Betar, the youth wing of the Zionist Revisionist Party, which was planning its own march through the city, and had set up vigilante protection squads to guard the Jewish community. ‘More uniforms,’ someone said. ‘They put on uniforms. We put on uniforms. Where will this end?’

  ‘It will end with the blatter of motorcycles,’ someone replied. ‘And then the blatter of other things.’

  Six o’clock struck on Piroshka’s clock. The company waited for Kasimir’s to follow, but it remained silent. Piroshka immediately rose, and, as Kasimir looked on, swung open the round glass door of his clock, inserted the brass key and, with a few gentle words of encouragement, wound it on several rotations. The clock murmured its thanks and began to tock softly.

  Unprompted, my mother took charge of the kitchen for the first time in her life, cooking a stew of vegetables – there being no meat to be had in the city – and some rice, all the time listening for, but not hearing, conversation in the adjacent room. She felt four sets of eyes upon her as she ceremoniously delivered the meal to the table, imitating the flourishes Piroshka made when she removed the lids of the serving dishes and announced what was inside. Silence hung in the room, as steam rose from the table. Then someone laughed and soon they were all laughing, and Kasimir said something my mother didn't understand – a proverb in a language that was not Russian – and they all descended upon my mother’s first meal. ‘Where did you get this roast lamb?’ Piroshka asked her, filling her plate with my mother’s simple vegetable stew. ‘You must tell me. I have never found any lamb like that at the market.’ One of her friends countered, ‘She must have found it at the same stall that sold her these truffles.’ ‘And the quail eggs too,’ someone added. ‘Can it be the season for quail eggs?’

  *

  In my journey through the photograph album I came to a signed picture of Simon Kaspé, a promising young concert pianist and son of the owner of the Hotel Moderne on Central Avenue. In 1935, while home on holiday from a season playing in Paris, he was kidnapped and a large ransom was sought for his release. His body was eventually found, badly beaten around the head and torso, and with two inches of his tongue missing, in a disused warehouse by the rail depot. On the facing page was a newspaper clipping announcing that three members of the Russian Fascist Party had been arrested for the crime. I knew, however, that they had been released within days upon the intervention of the Japanese authorities for reasons that were never explained.

  Many of Harbin’s remaining Jews departed for Shanghai over the following months. Kasimir was asked to arrange for the sale of a small dacha in the countryside on behalf of a family who had left for the South. On a visit to check on the property he fell from the train and broke his left arm, snapping his elbow so badly that the arm lost most of its strength. From then on he could not raise his arm much higher than his waist, and it hung loosely, the hand involuntarily rotating outwards. It was the end of his playing days.

  Now I felt a hand on my shoulder, Kasimir’s good hand. ‘Look at that,’ he said, leaning over the photograph album. ‘He is watching you, poor, sweet boy that he was. He is happy to see you go to Shanghai to join the Conservatory. He wishes you well.’ I studied Simon Kaspé’s young face, clean shaven, eyes bright with promise and with dedication to his art.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s obvious,’ he said, ‘Can’t you see it too?’ and he reached across and turned down the wick of the lamp until the flame went out, leaving only a line of tiny fibres glowing orange. ‘Sleep,’ he said from the darkness above me. ‘You have an early start in the morning.’ I put the album away and lay down again on my blanket, pulling another blanket over me. But I did not sleep again that night, and when Piroshka’s clock struck four I rose and got dressed and closed my suitcase, and then sat by the window looking across the roof tops of the city, searching for the first light of day.

  4. Love’s Song

  I was born in January of 1942, a war-child in a city under military rule, with chaos and despair all around, food and medicine in short supply, rats and sewage fouling the water. The Japanese had pillaged the city’s stores of soybeans and wheat to feed the soldiers dug in around the periphery of the city. At night their artillery lit up the sky, fired into the freezing mist at blurred shapes on the surrounding plain, shapes that could have been the Red Army, the Chinese Nationalists, or the Chinese Communists, or perhaps just terrified peasants or other fauna. In the week of my birth, coal and firewood doubled in price, and then trebled. And the winter, as usual, froze everything: the Songhua river, water pipes, spittle fresh from the mouth, the whiskers and eyebrows of old men, the manes of horses and donkeys, and the flesh of beggars or unfortunate citizens who had lost their way in the dark during the blackout.

  It also froze Yao Xijiu, my mother’s first husband, who, as I emerged into the grey half-light of a hospital ward, lay half a kilometre away, dead, part of a snowdrift on the river, not to be discovered until the spring thaw. The couple had been estranged for most of a year. Indeed, my mother could not say exactly why she had married him, and perhaps for that reason she did not tell me about Yao until I was preparing to leave home at the age of thirteen. It is never good to keep secrets from your children, she admitted; but sharing them too soon can be worse. If you leave things buried long enough some get absorbed into the soil, she added; others rise to the surface like stones in a field, but you never know which things will come back, or when.

  ‘What else are you hiding from me?’ I remember asking.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, and smiled at me.

  When she married him Yao was running away from his comprador family, from the gaggle of wives and concubines tiptoeing on bound feet about the family courtyard as if drunk, from
the obligation to pay homage to the ancestral tablets on the family altar, from the elder brother whose duty and pleasure it had been to beat him, and who, from the day after his wedding, sat smoking at the dinner table waiting for his new wife to place his chopsticks in his hand. Yao had joined the Communist Party after reading Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman, a pamphlet which opened his eyes to the ceremony of cannibalism that was Confucian family life, each generation consuming and embittering the one that followed it.

  He had changed his name, found a job, and forsworn the twin evils of opium and foreign commerce. My mother met him at a night class in political theory, and she was present at the ceremony when he swore allegiance to the Party. Then just months after they were married, he disappeared for several days and returned to inform her that he had inherited an opium den from his uncle, and planned to use its profits to fund the Party’s publications. That night as he slept my mother walked out of the room they shared carrying all her belongings in a canvas bag. The party found her lodgings elsewhere, and since the opium trade was at that time monopolised by the Japanese, it was only with great difficulty that my mother convinced the local communist organisation – and in particular Lu Feng, the railway engineer from Shanxi Province – not to eliminate Yao as a traitor.

  Yao did not betray the party to the Japanese opium bosses; but when he discovered that my mother was pregnant to Lu Feng, he cut a hole in the crust of ice that covered the river and tried to drown himself. Two schoolboys pulled him from the water – a lump of human jelly, flesh blackened with the cold – and he was resuscitated by diners on a table at the Delicious Overflow Dumpling House, which stood on the river bank by the promenade. As soon as he was well enough he tried again, this time climbing onto the railway bridge and throwing himself onto the ice. There were no witnesses, and a fall of snow covered his body. The next spring he floated to the shore suspended in the middle of an ice-floe, arms outstretched like a diver. My mother, holding me in her arms, identified his body in the mortuary.

  When she married Yao, my mother had not long returned to Harbin from Beijing. Indeed, on the very day three years previously when she had collided with a young man carrying a gramophone outside the British Chicken and Duck Factory she had learned that the Harbin Medical School would close. The teaching staff had been reduced to only four professors, the others having left for the Soviet Union or Shanghai, and the Japanese had no interest in supporting the school. My mother managed, through one of her professors, to secure a place at a medical school in Beijing run by an American missionary with socialist leanings, and within a week was on the train heading south.

  On her return to Harbin in 1940, she found her old neighbourhood in the possession of ladies in kimonos, their wooden sandals clopping on the pavement, shadowing their menfolk, performing their bird-like greeting ceremony whenever they met some acquaintance, with deep bows and high-pitched twittering. In the fashionable district of Uchaskovaja beige-clad Japanese soldiers, on leave from the war in China, lounged outside department stores whose balconies were draped with the white flag with the red central sun.

  My mother found work in a Chinese mission hospital in Daowai, amongst the workers’ tenements. Her patients now included many impoverished Russians, forced out of lodgings in Daoli. She slept on the floor of the apartment in the Bolshoi Prospekt, and used her irregular shifts to conceal from Kasimir and Piroshka that she was attending secret meetings of a Communist Party cell and courting Yao Xijiu. She knew that, to them, communism’s sole virtue was that it was not fascism. Besides, to reveal her political convictions would have put them in danger, for in those years life for the communists of Harbin, and for anyone associated with them, was often brutish and short. The Party was dominated by young writers and poets who flirted with martyrdom by staging ‘flying demonstrations’ of street theatre, inviting identification, arrest, and, if not execution, at least a harsh beating in the police cells.

  The cell to which my mother, Yao Xijiu and latterly my father belonged was in charge of the printing press, and thought itself the nerve centre of the Party. Yao had himself bought the press from a bankrupt Russian pamphleteer, dismantled it, and transferred it in small shipments to the back room of an abandoned dacha just outside the city. He tried to convince my mother that they should live in the dacha, and make use of its small vegetable plot to grow food. She refused, but pointed out that, were they married, she would be eligible for a cramped seventh-floor room with a shared kitchen and bathroom that was adjacent to the hospital and near Yao’s workplace. Yao agreed, and after her next shift took her to the registry office.

  She explained all this to me as we assembled a pile of clothes for me to take with me to Shanghai.

  ‘So Kasimir and Piroshka didn’t attend your wedding.’

  ‘I didn’t want to put them in danger,’ she replied.

  ‘From the police?’

  ‘Or from the Party itself,’ she said. And she explained that after the debacle of 1937 the local Party organisation would be seized by paranoia from time to time, and cells would purge suspected traitors in their midst with a bullet to the head or burial alive. Often family members met the same fate. Indeed, after the revolution was over my father, with his liking for statistics, had worked out to his chagrin that more party members had died in this way than had been killed by the Japanese or the Nationalists.

  So my mother had arrived home and told Kasimir and Piroshka simply that she had got married and was leaving that night. They had sat speechless for an hour, she told me, sighing occasionally and patting each other on the hand while watching my mother pack her clothes and books. Finally, Kasimir had turned to Piroshka and said, ‘In truth, my dear, did we at any time in the last twenty years think it could end any other way?’ They rose and embraced my mother stiffly, and she went on her way.

  Around the time of her wedding my mother was asked to treat a number of frostbite victims from a mental asylum run by the Japanese military on the outskirts of the city. Every few days an officer would bring in one or more inmates with severe frostbite to fingers, feet, toes, noses and ears. The inmates – Russians and Chinese – were delirious with pain and, my mother suspected, a dose of some powerful sedative. It was minus thirty degrees Celsius most days, but so many cases from one place seemed strange. After the second group of victims was brought in, my mother called a colleague who had some Japanese and together they tried to question the officer about why so many inmates were suffering frostbite. Were the asylum staff aware that the mentally ill often had impaired ability to feel pain? Did they allow the patients to spend time out of doors without supervision? The officer refused to respond, but instead smiled sweetly and made a sawing motion with his finger to indicate the treatment required. He stood watching as orderlies restrained the patients while my mother administered diluted opium as an analgesic, removed the affected limbs, digits and facial features, and cauterised the exposed flesh. None of the patients was allowed to stay at the hospital to recuperate, and the officer insisted on retrieving the pieces of blackened tissue and body parts, placing each of them in a separate canvas bag, one for each patient, and packing them into a small suitcase.

  ‘Perhaps they are going to eat them,’ my mother’s colleague whispered to her. ‘Perhaps it’s some sort of Japanese delicacy.’

  ‘Then surely they should fatten them up first,’ my mother replied.

  *

  One night my mother arrived home from her shift to find Yao in animated conversation with a tall man whom he introduced as Lu Feng, an experienced party organiser just arrived from Yan’an. ‘But he is originally from . . .’

  ‘. . . from Harbin, yes I know,’ my mother interjected. ‘And your gramophone?’ she asked the visitor, looking him full in the face, ‘Do you still have your gramophone?’

  Lu’s brows tensed momentarily. ‘No,’ he replied slowly. ‘I pawned it, and I haven’t had time to go looking for it again. And you,’ he continued, ‘did you ever recall those lines of verse that y
ou had forgotten?’

  ‘Lines of verse?’

  ‘Unless I am mistaken, you were the girl I met on Anguo Street,’ Lu said.

  ‘Yes. In 1937. You were carrying a gramophone.’ She directed a smile at Yao, who was listening to the exchange, open-mouthed. ‘And I had my medical textbooks.’

  ‘But you were trying to remember some lines of verse,’ he said, ‘at least that is how it looked to me. You had a faraway look in your eyes.’

  My mother laughed. ‘I was probably memorising parts of the human skeleton . . . but have it your way, then; what poem was it, do you think?’

  Lu pursed his lips, and, addressing himself to one of his hands in the manner of an actor, intoned:

  May all your tears, wanderer,

  fall into the Yangtze at its western source.

  The room fell silent. It was Yao who eventually chuckled to himself and completed the verse:

  Then the river will flow to the east,

  bringing them here to my home.

  Over the course of the evening, Lu explained that since his flight from the city in 1937 he had travelled west to the Communist Party headquarters in Yan’an, where he had received further political training and made plans for the takeover of the railway network. He had returned to the north, recruiting cadres in villages near the Russian border, before being sent back to Harbin. He had retrieved his record collection from a comrade, but he had no money to redeem his gramophone. ‘My cousin has a gramophone,’ Yao said, ‘so you must come back tomorrow night with your record collection. You must promise to do that.’

  The next day Lu was there at dusk with his records, and strode up the seven flights of stairs two at a time to find only my mother there, puzzling at the failure of her husband to return from work. ‘I don’t know the cousin my husband refers to,’ she explained, ‘Perhaps he lives across the other side of the city.’ An hour passed and Yao had not returned. She fed Lu Feng a small piece of pork, some greens and some noodles, eating little herself. Lu and my mother continued to talk about the music inscribed (for the time being uselessly) into the black shellac of his records, but then, as the curfew was called in the street below, Lu took my mother’s hand and led her into the dark stairwell.