The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  ‘Wa-gu-ne.’

  Kasimir was silent. My father and I looked up at him, and found that he had screwed up his face. ‘Never heard of him,’ Kasimir said. (The next day Wa-gu-ne was missing from the pile, and never reappeared.)

  ‘Ge-lei-su,’ my father went on.

  ‘Ge-lei-su?’ Kasimir said, his voice rising sharply. He came down from his chair, and studied the record. ‘Ge-lei-su,’ he repeated, ‘I can’t think who that is. Gluck, perhaps, or Glinka or Glazunov? Why not put it on and see?’

  I watched as my father slipped the disk from its cover and balanced it on his thumb and fingertips. He placed it delicately on the platen, aimed the beaten brass cone at us like a blunderbuss, and wound the handle a dozen or so times, releasing a sound like throat-clearing. He released a catch and the record began to turn. ‘Seventy-eight revolutions per minute,’ he said, and placed the needle-arm at the edge of the record. There was a crackle, so loud that my father winced. Then a violin began to play in a far away room – a sweet, lilting tune, but with a spareness that conjured up a waif-like violinist with concave cheeks and sunken eyes, clutching his bow in bony fingers.

  ‘Kreisler, of course,’ Kasimir laughed. ‘Ge-lei-su. It’s Kreisler’s Liebesleid.’

  ‘This also is my favourite,’ my father said.

  ‘But you said Ba-la-mo is your favourite,’ I objected. ‘How can you have two favourites?’

  ‘I am Iron Lu, so I can have as many favourites as I like,’ my father answered indignantly. ‘They are all my favourites.’ And he placed his hand reverently on the pile of records.

  *

  It was three weeks before my father’s next visit. He had been called away to meetings with Marshal Lin Biao to negotiate Harbin’s ‘voluntary contributions’ to the war effort, he said. And in addition, his plan to register all citizens required special measures to deal with the illiterate itinerant workers and ‘bad elements’. The night he visited again we ate a simple meal by candle-light, the electricity having been diverted to the aircraft factory and the Harbin Railway Car Factory, which was now devoted to the assembly of small Soviet-model tanks. After the meal, Piroshka rose abruptly and sat down at the piano. She nodded to me and I produced my violin. Together we played the Liebesleid from a score that Kasimir and I had laboriously transcribed note by note from my father’s record.

  This was the first time my father had heard me play. He stared at me as if I were some kind of miniature god, watching every move of my bow, and following the fingers of my left hand as they crawled like a spider up and down the strings. And in response to his gaze I found myself emphasising the swooping and diving of the melody with the kind of theatrical movements I had seen Piroshka use when she played the oboe. I wanted not simply to play the music, but to send it forth to penetrate the skin of my father’s chest and to lodge amongst his ribs, as a bird finds its home in a metal cage.

  When we stopped, my mother leapt to her feet and clapped. Kasimir slapped his right thigh and smiled his satisfaction. But my father only clapped quietly, as if not wishing to disturb some fragile thing with raucous noise. He called me to his side and put his hand up to my cheek. ‘Lu Feng’s daughter is right,’ he said, continuing our conversation of three weeks earlier. ‘I am allowed only one favourite, and this Ge-lei-su, it is my favourite.’

  5. Happiness

  For the duration of the Civil War my father’s duties meant he was for the most part absent from my life. From time to time, he would appear, unannounced, at the apartment, always producing from his satchel some gift of food – a jar filled with millet, a leathery knot of bean curd wrapped in cloth, three or four potatoes or some greens in a bag – and would stay for an hour or two. He would expect me to play for him whatever music I was learning, and Piroshka and I would oblige. Her hands would dance across the piano, and she would hiss through her teeth whenever she struck B-flat above middle C (for it had slipped out of tune and the only piano tuner she trusted had left for Shanghai the year I was born). I would stand at her shoulder and play, turning frequently to catch my father’s eye. He would listen with his eyes closed, nodding his head with the music, and then would open one eye to make sure we had finished, before clapping loudly. I learned quickly that, although he loved to listen to music, and could hardly believe his luck in having a child who was musically talented, he himself was not capable of telling a good performance from one that was merely competent. Several times I remember turning to bask in his enthusiastic applause knowing in my heart that I had neglected my phrasing, and slurred notes that should have been sharp like pins. If Kasimir was present on these occasions he would slap his thigh by way of applauding, but his eyebrows would be raised and I knew to expect a meticulous critique as soon as my father left.

  During one visit my father produced a length of string from his pocket, laid it along the top of my violin, then folded it in half and got me to place my finger on the violin string at the exact halfway point. ‘Perhaps your Auntie has explained this to you,’ he said, with a glance at Piroshka, ‘but every string on a stringed instrument covers two octaves – that is an unalterable mathematical truth – and so the note that is produced if you play halfway along the string should be exactly one octave higher than the note that is produced if you play the string without touching it. Try it and see.’ I plucked the string twice, and my father’s theorem was proved.

  ‘And if you divide the length of the string in half again you will find it plays a note that is in harmony with the first note. And if you continue to divide by half, every note made will be in harmony. And what is more, you will find the same happens if you divide the length of the string by three. You see, music is simply the mathematics of the ear. All notes on the scale rest in a precise mathematical relationship to each other. There is a name for this, but I do not remember it. Do you know what it is?’

  I looked to Piroshka who was mending clothes by the fire. ‘Garmonicheskiy ryad,’ she said, without looking up from her needle. ‘But don’t expect me to say it in Chinese.’

  ‘Garmonicheskiy ryad,’ I relayed. ‘We don’t know if there is a Chinese word too.’

  ‘How could there not be,’ my father assured me, ‘when it was Confucius who discovered it, and taught it to the Greek, Pythagoras?’ He took the violin from me and turned it over in his hands. ‘With a few measuring tools and the right formulae I could describe in precise mathematical terms the sound waves this violin emits. The dimensions of the box, the way the strings vibrate, how the sound bounces around inside before it comes out, that is all I would need. I could give you a compound formula for it, although I am a busy man and it would take me a long time to work it out.’

  ‘And a lot of paper to write it down,’ muttered Piroshka, without looking up.

  My father handed the violin back to me. ‘Have you ever been up onto the roof at night? If you listen carefully you will hear the music of the stars and planets in their orbits. Confucius listened to it all the time, and I have heard it myself on rare occasions when I was at Yan’an with Marshall Lin Biao. You need a clear night with no enemy bombers about. Even then it takes a very good ear to hear it. Perhaps China will develop a machine for listening to this music.’

  After my father had gone, Piroshka sat at the piano. ‘Draw a stave,’ she said, ‘and write down this melody.’ She struck a key. ‘What note is that?’ she asked.

  ‘F,’ I said.

  ‘Close. It’s E,’ she said. ‘Write it down. And what is this next note?’

  ‘A-flat,’ I said.

  ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Now I will play the melody slowly, and you write down what you hear.’

  The melody was no more than a few bars long. When I had finished transcribing it Piroshka looked at my work, and turned a couple of quavers into semi-quavers, then drew a small tick at the end of the stave. ‘Good. Now I want you to draw three more staves, and I want you to do three things that your father would approve of. First, I want you to turn the tune upside down, so that i
nstead of going up a third at the start, you go down a third, then down to the fifth, and so on. Then I want you to take the original melody and write it backwards. And thirdly I want you to write the upside down version and the backwards version on the same stave. You have ten minutes.’

  She returned to her mending while I worked. I found the exercise harder than I had thought. The clocks above the mantelpiece thudded mechanically, and I felt my ten minutes running down, tock by tock. When my time was up, Piroshka turned one eyebrow towards me and said, ‘You are finished, are you?’

  I nodded. But instead of checking my work, she went straight to the piano and sat down. ‘Tell me if this is what you have written,’ she said, and proceeded to play exactly what I had in front of me: the original melody, the inverted version, the melody reversed, and the combination of inverted and reversed melody which turned out to be in perfect counterpoint. I followed each note, and at the end laughed and clapped.

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

  ‘It is by Bach, and when Bach was in a mathematical frame of mind this is how he wrote music,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘We should arrange for your father to meet Bach. I am sure they would have a lot to talk about. Now tell me, do you think the piece is more beautiful because you know how it was written? Because you understand its inner mathematics?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me the answer.’

  ‘There is no answer,’ she said. ‘I only know this: to be a good musician you must not play only from your head, nor must you play only from your heart. This is what some people say, but it is an absurd romanticism. Like everyone else you play with your bones and your muscles and your nerves. You play from the base of your spine.’ She touched my lower back with her hand. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘This is where all of these meet: bones, muscles and nerves. This is where you play from. Is there any mathematics here? Perhaps we will ask your mother to bring home a scalpel some night and we can cut you open and see.’

  *

  On his next visit my father brought a rolled-up map of the city which he spread out on the table, holding down its curling edges with two small marrows, a roll of dried bean curd and a bag of beans. ‘See?’ he said. ‘I have divided the city into six districts in the interests of public order and hygiene.’ He indicated thick pencilled lines which made the city look something like the diagram on the back wall of the kosher butcher’s shop – a carcass divided into various cuts of meat. ‘Each district in turn has been divided into fifty-eight neighbourhoods, and each neighbourhood has around fourteen thousand people. And we have organised seventeen thousand citizens into night watch self-defence teams.’ As he spoke he drew from his breast pocket a pencil stub and wrote each of the numbers on a blank area of the map. (My father already shared the Party’s faith in the innate gravity of large numbers, especially those in excess of ten thousand, a ‘myriad’ in classical Chinese, the largest number that the ancient mathematicians thought could be contemplated.) ‘Each neighbourhood can be sealed off so not even a mouse can escape,’ he went on. ‘Soon we will have registered every citizen. No one will be left out.’

  Public hygiene provided my father with a wealth of numbers, and these he also added to his map as he spoke; numbers for the repatriation of Japanese civilians, for the disposal of night soil, the rationing of food, and the detention of carriers of syphilis and typhoid and cholera. Next, my father declared, indeed that very night – and here he drew a circle around the infamous Pingkangli neighbourhood – there would be a war on brothels and pimps. And so early the next morning an army of purgation fell upon Pingkangli. Police armed with whistles and truncheons, and nurses trained in the arts of dosing and restraint, descended upon the Virtuous Wind Inn, the Red Eagle Inn, the Peach Garden Bookhouse and the Heavenly Happiness Hall. The raid was a failure. There had been a tip off, and my father’s net landed a meagre catch of ageing syphilitics and one surprised brothel-keeper who was convinced he had bought protection from a high official. Although the premises in Pingkangli were closed down the trade continued elsewhere. A municipal edict appeared on posters throughout the city, and rewards were offered for information leading to the arrest of pimps and prostitutes and their clients. My father – foolishly, he realised later – required each of the fifty-eight neighbourhoods to root out two brothels apiece. Within a week all of them had obliged. Flushed with success, he asked for two more; and that quota was also met. At first he was delighted; but when the tally of underground brothels reached five hundred, and the police petitioned him to expand Xiangfeng Prison, he called the campaign to a halt, and discovered to his dismay that the cells were filled not with whores, brothel-keepers and pimps, but with small-time gangsters, displaced Korean traders, alcoholics, imbeciles, neighbourhood misanthropes and homosexuals.

  In spring the Nationalists mounted a massive counter-attack and all matters of hygiene were set aside. The Communist forces, more used to fighting as guerrillas than as a conventional army, were expelled from the city of Changchun and pushed back across the Songhua River. On my father’s next visit he complained of back pain and would not sit. Instead, he leaned on the fireplace like a drooping flower, and admitted that there had been ‘myriads’ of dead. My mother was sent to work in a field hospital to the south of the city, once again performing amputations and, exhausting her supplies of ether, resorting to opium and then to the barely effective mandrake root. And when I did finally climb to the roof of the apartment building, on a hot night in summer, it was not to listen to the music of the spheres but to witness the distant flashes of artillery fire in the night sky and to feel the heavy thuds through my feet.

  The siege continued for six months, and then Marshall Lin Biao made his famous counterattack, crossing the frozen Songhua and attacking the Nationalists in their winter quarters. The battle lines crawled south, each day another few metres, another few hundred dead, until the combatants reached the railway junction at Siping. My father described the attack by 40,000 of our troops. ‘Si wan,’ he repeated, ‘four myriads, and a myriad dead on the other side,’ as he unloaded wizened mushrooms and tubers from his pockets onto our table. He had brought my mother back from the front. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, the bones protruding from her elbows and collarbone. I helped her to remove her clothing, which was encrusted with brown slime, and watched her burn it all in a brazier in the lot behind our apartment. Then I watched as Piroshka took a razor and a basin and shaved my mother’s head, and gathered her hair in the basin and took it out to the brazier as well. By the time Piroshka returned my mother was lying on her side in bed, motionless, her eyes open, but saying nothing, dismissing me with a curt flick of her eyes when I attempted to speak to her,. When I returned with some food for her she was curled up like a foetus, so still that I had to hold my finger gingerly to her ribs to check that she was breathing. I undressed and got into bed beside her. For the whole of that night I felt I was sleeping with a ghost.

  After the victory at Siping the war grew more distant. The night flashes and rumbling never returned. But by then my parents had another challenge to deal with: an outbreak of bubonic plague. Where it came from was a mystery at the time, but history now traces it to the rats and fleas raised by Japanese researchers in Unit 731 and then released, rather than destroyed, after the Japanese surrender. The disease had been incubating in sewers, basements and garbage dumps, and in the spring of 1947 it began to spread through the city, claiming first the labourers, hawkers, porters, and unemployed droshky drivers, and all those who wedged themselves and their belongings into the city’s crevices and ruins. Neighbourhoods were sealed off immediately, and I saw neither of my parents for the duration of the outbreak. They toured the city together in face masks, overseeing the quarantine, distributing crates of Russian vaccines, supervising mass burials, and issuing ammunition to the neighbourhood watch committees who were manning the barricades around the infected areas of the city.

  All road and rail traffic was controlled. School was
closed, and we were urged to stay indoors despite the onset of warmer weather. The apartment building on Razyezhaya Street filled up with stray relatives and their children, many of them sleeping in the stairwells and filling our nights with arguing and singing and the bellowing of infants. The rabbi’s widow and her nephew slept in our apartment and repaid us by foraging all day for food. I stayed at the apartment all day and practiced with Piroshka, and soon we gained an audience of plague exiles, who would enter our room without knocking and sit along the walls and the hearth or cluster by the doorway. One of these guests produced a viola, which she played (badly) and another brought out his uncle’s euphonium and asked to join in. Piroshka rolled her eyes at first, but then relented and we improvised on a Bach fugue.

  When our morning’s session was over and my fingertips were red and aching and Piroshka closed the lid over the keyboard and called for the rabbi’s widow to light the samovar, Kasimir would regale us with stories about old Harbin or the lives of the great composers and musicians. Perhaps because of the plague and its air of extremity, he decided not to spare us the details of Schubert’s syphilis, or Chopin dying abandoned by his mistress, or Schumann’s failed suicide and madness or Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s troubled homosexuality. Sometimes Piroshka would join in, once she had a large cup of Russian tea in her hands, and she would talk about the great operatic divas she had met. I came to understand that all either died young and tragically or old and forgotten, in any case bereft of some great love (a tenor or conductor or junior prince without the courage to leave wife and children). ‘Great music,’ she declared to our gathering, ‘is what great people make out of great suffering.’ And added, with a laugh and a quick glance out of the window to the silent street, ‘But particularly the suffering they bring upon themselves.’

  One of our neighbours was an elderly Manchu woman with a long, noble face, watery dog-eyes, and a top lip which strayed upwards involuntarily as if she were yawning, or snarling, or curling her mouth around an oddly shaped fruit (a sure sign of childhood polio, my mother told me). She would arrive at the apartment at daybreak in order to secure her seat, and when she was finally obliged to leave she would approach me and cup my chin in her hand. ‘Your music chases away the plague,’ she said to me, ‘so stay with us here in this building and play, and we will all be saved.’ I was captivated by the thought, imagining that each time I put down my violin the sickness would begin to roll silently towards our building like a river mist and wash against the risers of the balustrade until I dispersed it with another tune.