The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  ‘The concierge will see us,’ my mother protested as they descended the stairs, but on the second floor Lu opened the door to an apartment and without hesitation led her past the occupants at their evening meal, the husband silently acknowledging him with a glance as the wife and children averted their eyes. He led my mother through a small door onto a fire escape and down into a courtyard hung with laundry, and from there through a series of alleys and factory yards, avoiding the main thoroughfares, sometimes feeling his way along walls with his fingertips, until they arrived at a staircase at the back of a warehouse. This they climbed and slipped into a dimly lit room where several men sat or lay on the floor.

  ‘Comrade Lu,’ one of them said, rising to his feet.

  ‘You must hurry, Peng,’ Lu said, ‘Comrade Yao is missing. Doctor Xiao says he did not return from work. That was three hours ago. Go at once to the police station. Ask for our friend Hui and get him to look for Yao in the cells.’

  Peng disappeared and Lu motioned to my mother to take his space on a thin mattress. ‘Wait here,’ he said, ‘and close the light. No need to take risks.’ He slipped out into the night. The light was extinguished and my mother sat in total darkness, listening to the breathing of the men in the room with her.

  After half an hour Lu returned with Peng. Yao was not at the police station, they reported.

  ‘Is that good news?’ my mother asked.

  No one spoke, and it seemed as if the dark had swallowed her words. She repeated her question.

  ‘No,’ Lu said. ‘It’s bad news. They may have taken him out into the fields to deal with him.’

  ‘Or to Unit 731,’ one of the other men said.

  ‘But we don’t even know for sure that he’s been detained,’ said my mother.

  ‘True,’ Lu replied. ‘We know nothing, but it is always dangerous when we know nothing about a Party member.’

  ‘To know nothing is always to know something,’ said a voice from a far corner of the room, an older man whose presence my mother had not so far registered. ‘Go home, sister, and advise Comrade Lu as soon as you hear anything.’

  Lu escorted my mother back to her building, entering via the fire escape, passing the sleeping forms of the family they had interrupted. He left her in the stairwell without a word.

  Several days later, Yao returned with the borrowed gramophone and a new set of clothes. By way of explanation he told my mother the story of the young boy who stops to watch two old men playing a game of chess, unaware that they are in fact immortals. When he returns home to his family after the game he finds that many years have passed and his formerly middle-aged parents are now in their dotage, and they embrace him tearfully as their long lost son.

  My mother did not even smile at this. Nor at his breathless explanation of how much he thought he could bring in from his opium den to support Party activities. She waited until he was asleep, then left for her shift at the hospital and did not return.

  My mother told me nothing of the remaining moves of this particular chess game, except that I was conceived two months later and that, before my mother could contact him to tell him she was pregnant, Lu was arrested by the Japanese, identified as a worthy trade for Japanese soldiers captured by the communists and consigned to Xiangfeng Prison, some ten kilometres to the south of the city.

  *

  So I arrived; in the hospital where my mother worked, by candlelight because the electricity had failed, and in the surgery ward because the labour was premature and there was no room anywhere else. (My mother showed me the bed once, telling the story to its new occupant, a man dying of pulmonary emphysema who bestowed a benison upon my head with a shaking hand.)

  Out of courtesy to her patients, my mother bit on a roll of cloth during the labour, to stifle her screams. Even so, most of the inhabitants of the ward lay awake through the night, occasionally passing on words of encouragement from their own darkened corners. A Christian woman intermittently prayed aloud for ‘Jidu’ to have mercy, and at dawn, auspiciously, I fell head first into the world, to be greeted by a circle of faces in the half-light.

  It was my first audience, and my imagination has provided me with a memory of the scene, a large canvas by one of the Dutch masters in a carved antique frame. Beneath the high vaulted ceiling, a crowd gathers around the foot of the third bed on the left where a midwife holds up a child to their view. There is a man in a wheelchair missing both legs. A young girl with a patch over one eye. A nurse wearing a gauze mask. Light descends from high windows. The floor is strewn with sawdust and brown slicks of blood and other fluids. There are dark figures observing from the shadows, showing only the whites of their eyes. There is an open door to the right, through which can be seen the muted shapes of others, going about their business indifferent to something as ordinary as a nativity scene.

  *

  My birth forced a reconciliation between my mother and Kasimir and Piroshka. My mother suffered post-partum bleeding and became severely anaemic, and the wet nurse she had arranged for me had contracted a fever the day of my birth and was sweating it out on a blanket in the corner of an adjacent ward. So my mother arrived back at Razyezhaya Street one morning carrying me under her coat. Wang Taitai the concierge helped her up the stairs and let her into the apartment and put us both to bed, which is where Piroshka found us several hours later.

  I spent my first eight years sleeping in the same tiny bed in the apartment on Razyezhaya Street – shared with my mother, when she was not on night shift – listening to the clocks chiming and the voices and laughter in the next room, just as my mother had as a child, except the talk was different now and where in the past there had been half a dozen guests there were now only one or two gathered around the table, faces lit by the buttery glow from the kerosene lamp which was pressed into service most nights when the electricity went off. Many of the voices my mother had overheard were by my time present only as names, their fates either illuminated by snippets of news or else the subject of speculation. The conversations would continue late into the night, punctuated by the clinking of bottle on glass and the hiss and gargle of a borrowed samovar, and then there would be awkward silences when no one spoke for a while, followed by quiet, relieved laughter as someone resumed the conversation rather than standing up to bring the evening to an end.

  I tried repeatedly to stay awake to hear the guests leave, but never succeeded. I would drift off to sleep and be wakened by my mother returning from her shift in the early hours of the morning and releasing her weight slowly, reverently, into the bed beside me. I would hear Piroshka gently snoring behind the curtain. At daybreak I would slip out of bed, leaving my three grown-ups to sleep on, and would sit in the parlour alone, marvelling at the fact that, despite the eating and drinking and singing of the night before, the room was spotlessly clean by morning. And from the freshly dusted mantelpiece the two clocks would shower the room with the crisp, white notes of ordinary time.

  *

  As with all war babies, the story of my infancy was the story of the war. My significant dates were the property of more momentous events. What, after all, were my cries alongside those of new widows and orphans? Or my first steps alongside the advance of an army of eighty thousand across a front a hundred kilometres long? Or my falls compared to the fall of cities? My three guardians worked tirelessly to provide for my needs and their own, but seemed inclined only to endure, rather than to mark, the passage of time. There were few photographs. And yet during that time I grew as any child would, learned the spoken rhythms of Russian and Chinese, slept curled against my mother’s belly (as if I had never left it), played on the stairs, was blessed with ‘aunties’ on every floor, and every evening leaned my back against the panels of the piano, feeling them vibrate as Piroshka produced delicate dishes by Mozart, Schubert and Chopin – feathers on a breeze of notes, she said – to calm herself after her day’s work was done.

  When I was three years old I received my first violin. It was a miniature ver
sion of a full-sized instrument and was pieced together on an intricate metal frame by a maker and repairer of stringed instruments who worked out of a dimly lit basement workshop near our apartment. I had seen a similar instrument at a friend’s place, and had picked it up and started running the bow over the strings. I forgot about it after that, but the incident was enough for Kasimir to take it into his head that I would play the violin rather than the piano or the oboe. (There was never a question of me not playing anything.) In all the early family photographs I am holding the tiny instrument, sometimes cradled in my arms like a doll, sometimes held by the neck, and sometimes jutting outwards from beneath my chin like a spindly kind of goitre. My mother, Kasimir and Piroshka, and sometimes one or more of their friends – the cantor from the synagogue or the violin-maker and his wife – would be standing witness in the background.

  By the time I knew them, Kasimir and Piroshka had time on their hands. The orchestra had folded, since its audience had been repatriated to the Soviet Republics, and most of its players – in particular those who were Jewish – had fled south to Shanghai. Those few who remained put on concerts for themselves and their families out of a sense of habit. I attended some of these, sitting in the cold of the unheated opera house before it was commandeered by the Japanese army for some unknown purpose. As the community dwindled so did the volume and texture of the applause, leaving sometimes no more than half a dozen family members or passers-by who would leap to their feet and, glancing reproachfully at the empty seats next to them, clap faster and louder in an attempt to give their applause a head start on the hollow echoes that quickly hunted it down and silenced it.

  My first violin lessons are among my earliest memories. Kasimir would stand me on a chair facing him, position his own violin under his chin, and play the open strings with the bow in his right hand. Then he would motion to me to do the same, teaching me how to hold my elbow, how to find each string with my eyes closed, how to play short, staccato notes and long, languid ones, how to play two strings at once, and how to play pizzicato, plucking the strings with my index finger while still holding the bow in my little fist. I learned bowing technique using melodies with only four notes – G, D, A and E – and developed, for a child, particularly strong neck muscles.

  I played simple duets with Piroshka on the piano, Russian folk tunes which Piroshka would speed up with successive rounds so that I learned to move my fingers across the strings faster and faster. On rare occasions, my mother would accompany me for my practice. I remember one occasion in particular when I was four and Piroshka suffered repeated bouts of vestibulitis that kept her confined to her bed for days at a time, groaning quietly while the world spun nauseatingly around her. My mother's performance was solid and error-free, but perhaps lacking in flair, and with constant appeals for advice to Piroshka, who lay inert on her side in the next room and replied in Italian, ‘affettuoso, tesora’, ‘piu saltando, tesora’, or, in a faint voice (when a fresh bout of nausea swept over her) ‘a piacere’.

  I learned to read the lines of notes on a musical stave, and at night as I slept breves would bob around beyond my grasp like pork buns, and quavers would crack open like melon seeds. The treble clef would float by like a plucked chicken with its neck broken, before being drawn helplessly into the spinning vortex of the bass clef. And amongst it all would swim the Chinese characters and the Cyrillic and Hebrew script I was learning, alephs and tavs and the pictograms for man and child and mouth and bird, popping like soap bubbles when my dream hands grasped at them.

  After my lessons, Kasimir would lose himself in the Chinese newspaper (the Russian language papers having ceased publication), mumbling to himself as he looked up unfamiliar characters in a dictionary whose disintegrating quires were sewn back together roughly with string. The exercise was a complicated one, as he only had the use of his right hand and needed to find the correct page and then hold it open while he read through the dictionary entry, and then scrawled the Russian translation with a pencil stub, word by word, in the narrow margins between the columns of the newspaper. His left hand served to hold the paper flat and keep his place on the page. Sometimes Piroshka and I talked for an hour or more while he worked his way meticulously through one page of news, declaring at the end that it was all untrue anyway and biased in favour of the Manchukuo Government.

  ‘Untrue?’ Piroshka would reply. ‘How do you know it is not your translation that is untrue?’

  ‘Would a dictionary lie?’

  ‘For sure it would. Translate it again and maybe it will tell you different things.’

  Kasimir would utter a soft ‘Pah’, and wander off to talk to one of the neighbours.

  *

  Throughout my early years my father lived barely ten kilometres away in Xiangfeng Prison, just outside the city. My mother was aware of this, but kept it to herself and made no attempt to contact him. Then one day in August 1945 he rose at dawn and began to sweep the courtyard, accompanied occasionally by monotone exchanges between the crows which sat like quavers along one side of the perimeter fence. After a few minutes he stopped suddenly. The silence had persisted too long. And the telegraph wires by the front gate, which would sing faintly as the morning’s first cables passed through, were now dead. Squinting up into the sun’s first rays he saw that there were no guards in the sentry towers. Some other prisoners stumbled, yawning, from their dormitories, and my father realised that the morning wake-up call was overdue. He tapped the guardhouse door lightly with his broom-handle. It swung open. There were no guards.

  With the help of a swaying stack of furniture, my father and several other prisoners scaled the barbed wire and searched the guards’ quarters and the prison administration building. The rooms were littered with the slurry of a sudden flight: discarded clothing and bedding, drawers and their contents upturned on mattresses, and a bouquet of black peonies, the charred remains of documents, nestled in a fireplace. A set of keys was found in the superintendent’s office, and soon the thousand or so prisoners gathered in the exercise yard, where my father stood on a chair to address them. He had barely begun when, with shouts and jeers, several prisoners pushed a Japanese soldier into the dust before my father’s chair. They had found him shivering with fear in the bottom of a cupboard, clutching a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes, eyes rolling around his head, unable or unwilling to speak.

  ‘It’s all an act,’ one of the prisoners said. ‘He’s feigning madness, appealing for mercy.’

  ‘Get him out of my sight,’ my father said, ‘and whatever you do with him don’t waste much time.’

  An hour and a half later an undisciplined column of prisoners arrived at the outskirts of the city, shaking up a cloud of dust with their bare feet. The streets were deserted except for stray dogs. They roused a shopkeeper, who hissed at them from his door, ‘The curfew is in force until nine!’ The prisoners continued on towards the railway station, troubled only by an occasional car or horse and cart until they drew within a few blocks of the city centre, at which point they met a group of young men who were running from door to door spreading the word that the authorities had withdrawn overnight with the surrender of the Japanese puppet government.

  At the railway station the column of prisoners assembled quietly, conversing with a group of communist partisans who were guarding the station. The streets were starting with fill with people who had set out for work, but were now talking in groups or watching as more partisans took possession of office buildings, throwing papers and furniture out of windows and doors, and occasionally frog-marching a captive towards the railway station. Someone announced that the railway tracks had been blown up to the east and the south.

  ‘Comrade Lu,’ someone called, and my father recognised Li Changching, one of the partisan leaders. Several years his senior, Li had been with my father during his training at Yan’an in the South. He was dressed in a baggy khaki uniform and boots laced with string. ‘Good to see you are alive. We heard you were a prisoner. How many me
n do you have here?’

  ‘About a thousand, comrade,’ my father answered, ‘but they are not my men. They are merely the other inmates from Xiangfeng. Only a few of them are members of the Party.’

  ‘Everyone who is not a Nationalist is on the side of the party,’ Li replied, ‘at least for now. Come, we have work to do.’ Li took my father to an office in the railway station. He produced some fresh steamed bread from a paper bag, and the two ate as they talked. ‘The Japanese forces are gone,’ Li began, ‘and the collaborationists are in flight. Our main objective now is to secure the city before the Nationalists can get here. I have received a wire from Marshall Lin Biao who tells me that the Nationalists hold southern Manchuria, and can be expected to mount an attack on us within the month. His plan is to hold Harbin and supply it from the Soviet Union so that we can become one arm of a pincer movement. There are ten thousand Soviet troops waiting at Irkutsk, ready to be moved here by rail as soon as we can arrange it. And ten thousand of Lin Biao’s troops will be in Qiqihar within a week, and can be picked up from there.

  ‘There are three things I want you to do. First, arrange for the tracks to be repaired and for trains to bring in the troops and their supplies from Irkutsk. Cancel all civilian trains until further notice. Second, I want you to take charge of the Mayor’s office, put reliable cadres in charge of all the municipal services, and in particular make sure there are preparations for the winter food supply. We must have a competent administration in place quickly. The Party has never been in control of a city before. Shacking up with the peasants in the countryside is one thing; but now we have to show that the Party can run a city. We don’t want to give the Russians any reason to revive their claims to Manchuria.’ My father nodded in agreement, his mouth full of steamed bread.