*
After the Liberation I moved with my parents into a new house. It was in a traditional four-sided courtyard, and we found ourselves with the unimaginable luxury of four rooms – a kitchen, a living room, my parents’ bedroom with a kang, where we could all sleep in winter, and a tiny bedroom where I slept when the weather was not too cold. We shared a bathroom and washhouse across the central courtyard with the other occupants: the Deputy Mayor, his two children and his elderly parents. We were joint owners of a small rat-catching dog and a succession of pigs purchased as yearlings for the purpose of transforming our collected food scraps into sizzling New Year’s treats.
My father surveyed our small pile of possessions, which had been deposited on the kang, and toured our quarters several times before pronouncing himself satisfied. That night he slept soundly, so soundly in fact that we could not wake him in the morning. I shook his arm, at first gently and then more vigorously, but he snored softly and did not open his eyes. My mother checked his pulse and pulled back one eyelid and slapped his cheek several times, at which he muttered something I could not pick up and then slept on. ‘Exhaustion,’ my mother explained. He had not had any rest for a decade. But when I returned from school that night she told me he was in hospital.
So I found myself once again sleeping with my mother, having been ousted from her bed for only one night. She too was exhausted, and would often sleep through the weekends, rising only to accompany me on our daily visits to my father in hospital. During that time I would rise and dress myself and make breakfast, or take a small lidded pot to one of the stalls on the corner where a pair of elderly twins would fuss over me like beavers with a cub, and I would return with my pot brimming with hot soy milk and two dough sticks balanced on top.
After a month or so my father returned home, but for the first week he did no more than patter slowly around the house in between long sessions of corpse-like sleep. Day and night seemed to have no meaning for him, and he did not even seem interested in playing his records on the gramophone. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, and see him reading, or making tea with the medicinal herbs he kept in a glass jar. I would sit up on the old kang with my legs tucked beneath me and watch him measure out the contents of the jar into a shallow cone folded from a sheet of paper, and then tip them into another jar. The discoloured petals, crumbling leaf skeletons, and what looked like the transparent wings of insects collected like a bird’s nest on the bottom of the jar. He would pour in the newly boiled water, releasing a foul stink of musty alleys, fish, and camphor. I would pull the covers over my head and around dawn would hear him returning to bed, where he would lie perfectly still for ten or twelve hours.
Eventually he took it into his head to use his time to supplement my education in mathematics. We covered sheets of thin rice paper – mostly the reverse sides of official Nationalist-era forms – with sequences of algebraic formulae, meandering strings of calculus, angles, curves, grids and geometrical figures, and I would find myself bursting out laughing as I observed the sleight of hand by which he brought an equation to resolution, like the tumblers falling into place within the metal innards of a lock.
‘If you are patient,’ he assured me, ‘and attentive, then anything you encounter will open its secrets to you. If you scratch the surface of anything you will find that what lies beneath is a fine web of mathematics. Everything is number, and number is everything. Each atom has its own formula, each molecule, the metal of the table leg, the wood on its top, the stone on the floor.’
‘And people?’
‘Yes, people too, a formula for how they move in space and in relation to things and to each other, how they walk, the sounds they make, the way they take in food and drink – if we could see the minute web of things we would find an infinite number of formulae. Wait, no’ – and here he jumped to his feet as best he could and raised his index finger emphatically – ‘No, these formulae are not infinite. It is a finite number of formulae, and one day we will master them all, as they meet and merge and transform and resolve each other endlessly, day and night, throughout the world and throughout the universe. They are millions upon millions, but we too – the people of China – are millions upon millions.’
He went on to explain gravity to me, how the individual object is drawn inexorably towards a larger mass via a formula which he made me write out several times. And the universe too, at least, the universe as envisaged by Blaise Pascal: ‘An infinite sphere,’ he read from his book, ‘whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’
‘Like China,’ I said, ‘the ‘middle kingdom.’
He tilted his head for a moment, and then smiled happily and patted my head. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘but not many can see that. A socialist needs to be alert, for if we notice, upon traversing some territory or other – be it physical or intellectual, a territory of ideas, events, people, history – if we notice that lines that should be parallel are not quite so; if we observe and measure and connect, and do not allow ourselves simply to pass over these troubling facts as if they were aberrations with no significance; if instead we recognise that the aberrations are what is significant; then we will see that we are living, not on a flat, regular plane, but on the curved surface of a sphere. And if we have three settled points and measure them accurately, then we can locate the centre of the sphere, and however distant it may be, it is a fulcrum from which the world can be moved, hidden from the many, known only to the few.’ I tried to look as if I understood, and my father seemed happy to accept this obvious fiction, for he extended his hand for me to shake. What exactly we were agreeing to I did not know.
*
As my father’s strength returned he began to take me on his bicycle around the city, and to tell me stories from the early days of the Communist Party and the struggle against the Japanese. I could not help comparing his tours of the city, of the sites of street battles and safe houses and ambushes, with Piroshka’s accounts of the lives of the White Russians, the Jews, and the Fascists. Each showed me a city that the other had never inhabited and only partly understood, although we traversed the same streets and gave the same directions to lost visitors. On one occasion my father took me down an alley and through large gates into a hall with a high vaulted ceiling. My nostrils were immediately filled with a syrupy confection of blood and offal, as if we were walking into the maw of a sleeping tiger after a kill. Thick shafts of light descended from a row of skylights, illuminating benches upon which the carcasses of pigs, chickens, sheep, and ducks lay disassembled. Stall keepers stood at attention behind piles of intestines and stomachs, lungs and kidneys, tripes, gizzards, Achilles tendons and pizzles, watching us as if waiting for us to give the signal to begin a competition to put the carcasses back together again.
On one table four pigs’ heads, with eyes and tongues removed, were stacked neatly in a pyramid. On the next sat three large vats of congealed black liquid with dirty red froth around the rim, which handwritten signs identified as the blood of sheep, pigs and chickens respectively. My father whistled softly to himself as he pushed his bicycle through the braided rivulets of blood that traversed the floor. What struck me was how different this place was, with its displays of gleeful carnage, from the small kosher butcher shop, the one with the menorah painted in gold on the window, and the map of the quartered lamb on the back wall, where I used to go with Piroshka every week to collect small parcels of flesh wrapped respectfully in brown paper.
My father leant his bicycle against one stall and pointed to a pig’s head. The stall owner patted the head affectionately, as if it were his child. Money changed hands and the head was hoisted into the basket on the front of my father’s bicycle. It journeyed home with us like a ship’s figurehead, casting its eyeless gaze this way and that as we steered around corners, proudly sniffing the air, and calling to our neighbours with its tongueless mouth, ‘Look everyone, look at who has honoured me, has invited me to grace their family pot! No
ne other than Iron Lu and his daughter, the violinist Xiao Magou!’
On weekends and summer evenings my father would spend time in the courtyard, attempting to practice tai ji chuan, or chatting with the neighbours. Sometimes I watched him as he stood for a long time in the middle of the courtyard, turning to a different point of the compass from time to time and staring at the angles of the roof, the paving stones and the pile of rubbish stacked against the back wall. I wondered if he was taking his own advice, looking for some lost mathematical principle, confident that if he was patient and stared for long enough it would eventually give itself up to him.
Then one day he showed my mother and me some plans he had drawn up for a fish pond he said he was going to build at the back of courtyard, where there was an old dried-up well. He would deepen the well, he said, and (provided he could restore the flow of water) build a large concrete trough about three metres long, in which he would keep river fish to be fattened up for the table. His plan included a small electric pump to draw the water from the trough and aerate it by cascading it down a miniature gorge of pebbles. There would be water lilies and orchids, and he would find some paint so that I could decorate the interior of the trough before it was filled.
‘And in the winter?’ my mother asked. ‘What happens in the winter when it freezes?’
‘We borrow a hammer and chisel,’ my father said. ‘And we eat frozen fish until there are no more. And then we start again in spring time, and put more young fish in the pond.’
*
The next day my father felt strong enough to return to work, and found that in his absence others had taken over the task of making the city hygienic and orderly, and were reluctant to give it back to him. He still had his office and his secretary, but his papers were stacked in neat piles in a locked cupboard and his desktop gleamed with new polish. It was Wen who told me this, years later, when I was about to leave Harbin. He also told me that for the following week my father travelled to every corner of the city to drink tea with Party officials of all ranks, that every day he had Wen place phone calls to Beijing and Shanghai, and that he even took a military aircraft fresh from the production line at the new aircraft factory and had a test pilot fly him to Jilin and Mukden in one day to visit old comrades, with Wen cowering beside him white with fear and suffering cold sweats and nausea.
At the end of that week my father told us that he had relinquished the position of Mayor and was to become Party Secretary at China Eastern Railways, and Commissar for Flood Control. He seemed very happy about this, although I recall going to school the next day fearful that, after his change of status, the special regard in which I was held as Iron Lu’s daughter might have diminished. My fears were groundless.
That very night he came home and, with the Deputy Mayor at his side, announced that I had been selected to play a concert for Mao Zedong in a week’s time. Mao was returning from a two-month sojourn in Moscow, my father explained. He was bringing back not only his first-hand observations of Soviet economic planning, but also a small red lacquer box containing the ashes of Xian Xinghai, China’s great revolutionary composer, who had died in Moscow in 1945.
The day arrived. The records show that Mao toured the railway workshops, delivered a speech (written text placed under the chairs in advance), attended a concert in his honour and spent a night at the suite on the top floor of the Hotel Moderne. I took top billing at the concert, accompanied by a small ensemble from the conservatory in Mukden. The heating in the theatre was working only intermittently, and the audience – party secretaries, local dignitaries, workers from the ball-bearing factory, and a company of soldiers from the barracks – sat for an hour waiting for the great man to arrive, hunched in their greatcoats with fur hats over their ears, steaming like a herd of bison.
I played a short piece adapted from the first movement of Xian Xinghai’s National Liberation Symphony, Massenet’s Élégie (which Xian himself had made famous after the defeat of the Guangzhou Commune), and Kreisler’s Prelude and Allegro (which my mother requested I play, as a surprise birthday present for my father). I was followed by a dance troupe, and a children’s choir who sang ‘The Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention’. And to finish, the Mukden ensemble and I played Nie Er’s March of the Volunteers – newly confirmed as the national anthem – after which the choir joined in and sang the words: ‘Arise! All those who would not be slaves! Let your flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall!’ Mao tapped one hand lightly on his opposite palm by way of applause, and afterwards made a speech about there being many strings in the bow of the Party, these strings being the individual Party members and the Communist Youth League, which must be stretched together in tight formation, or else there would be no sound. The shaft of the bow was Marxist-Leninist thought; the body of the violin was the Middle Kingdom itself. (My father was very pleased with this metaphor, claiming that he himself had suggested it to the Great Leader.)
In spring the floods came as usual, and my father summoned the Party leaders to the floodplain outside the city and, stripping himself to the waist, swam out to a large tree marooned in the still waters, where he hoisted himself onto a branch and sat, torso glistening in the sun, to announce that that year’s flood would be the last. The news spread quickly around the city that tens of thousands of peasants from the western provinces – where one of father’s Yan’an colleagues was Party Secretary – would arrive in summer to work on new floodbanks, and that my father had explained all this as he swung joyfully on a rope attached to the tree, urging the senior Party officials to shed their clothes and join him in celebrating the event. Wen showed me the photographs that had been taken at the scene: my father addressing the crowd from the tree; my father swinging gaily to and fro as some of his comrades – including our housemate the Deputy Mayor – struggled with their clothes and threw themselves into the flood waters; those that had remained ashore applauding, with fixed grins; my father, back on dry land, wearing a bath robe with the monogram of the Hotel Moderne, laughing, with his head thrown back and his hands on his hips and the scar on his eyebrow somehow larger than I had ever noticed. Within a year, Wen told me, all of those who had remained on the embankment had been quietly demoted to clerical positions in dusty border towns. Two had died by their own hands. The Deputy Mayor was promoted to Mayor, despite which, Wen told me, he still made a daily visit to my father’s office to receive orders.
For the time being all thought of deepening the well and building a fish pond was set aside. After school each day I made my way up to the corner of Razyezhaya Street and climbed the familiar staircase of the dark brick apartment building for my violin lesson. By this time the building that had housed the Club of the Russian Student Society was the headquarters of the neighbourhood committee, and advertised night classes in Marxist political theory, perinatal health, the piano accordion, and Mao Zedong thought.
One afternoon in early summer I arrived at the apartment and found that Kasimir and Piroshka were not there. In their place were a young Chinese woman and an older man, a Russian who, in spite of the fact that it was a moderately warm day, kept his hands thrust into the pockets of a long overcoat with a belt and buckle dangling from its sides and a detachable cape.
‘Are you Xiao Magou?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Your violin teacher has sent us to collect you,’ she said. ‘You are to have your lesson today in the centre of the city. It is all arranged.’
I followed the two strangers downstairs and they drove me in a car to Central Avenue, where we drew up outside the Hotel Moderne. ‘Here we are,’ the woman said. ‘Mr Karpin will accompany you to your lesson.’ She withdrew, and the Russian man took my violin case and strode ahead of me through the main door of the hotel, barely acknowledging the salute of the soldier who stood guard.
We passed the hotel reception desk and walked briskly across the chess-board floor of a high-ceilinged lounge, threading our way amongst padded l
eather chairs, drooping palms and stands of bamboo in large porcelain tubs. The lounge appeared empty save for a trio of army officers holding conclave in one corner around a hissing radiator. A pair of long boots stretched out from behind a rubber plant, heels resting upon a grey footstool that on second glance turned out to be an elephant’s foot.
We stepped into the elevator, and I noticed Mr Karpin’s surprise when he turned from the panel of buttons to find that I was almost as tall as him. (I was prematurely sprouting in the legs and arms.) ‘You speak a little Russian?’ he said. I corrected him, ‘I speak a lot of Russian,’ and smiled to myself. He said no more. When the elevator stopped with a bump he wrenched aside the squealing brass gate and pushed open the door with his foot. We walked through the gloom of the corridor, the dim lights illuminating patches of vermilion wallpaper decorated with a gold scroll pattern. At the end of the corridor Mr Karpin opened a door without knocking and led me into a large room.
‘Wait here,’ he whispered, and handed my violin case back to me. Then he left the room, taking great care to close the door soundlessly.
I put my violin on a low table by the door and turned to examine my new surroundings. As if on cue, a silver clock to my right, set in its own cabinet with tiny drawers, announced my arrival with a tinkling fanfare. And as if in response, the crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling rattled discreetly, and with its myriad facets directed beams of milky white light onto the other occupants of the room: a sprawling divan with round tasselled cushions, a marble chess set on a circular table, and a polished bureau, on which sat a silver samovar in the shape of a turnip and a matching silver tray whose lip encircled a plate of cakes, an array of scimitar-shaped knives, a tea-cutter, a sugar-hammer, and a nest of gold-rimmed tea-glasses. Standing beside the tray on its own lace doily was a bottle of vodka.
I had had very little experience of beautiful objects. With very few exceptions – the mirror, the clocks, a couple of plates – the things in the apartment in the Bolshoi Prospekt and now in our new house in Daoli were servants dressed in plain brown or black, who did their job silently and then retreated into anonymity. Here in this room everything sought out the eye in its own right. Nothing here was plain. Every surface was carpeted or papered or moulded in relief with geometrical patterns that folded in on themselves and led my eyes along intricate mazes. I wandered around the room studying surfaces that were turned or carved with designs of vines or flowers, or inlaid with some luminous metal, or polished so smooth as to give the illusion of glowing coals encased in a sheet of thin ice.
The Phoenix Song Page 12