The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  And then I felt the polarity in the room change and found myself drawn to a table in front of the window, tucked behind a high-backed armchair. On it was a violin case wrapped in navy blue cloth. Without hesitation I opened it.

  I do not know how much I took in during those first few minutes. Later on, when it came into my possession, I came to know the violin intimately, as one knows the body of a lover or a child. In my memory, however, I pull back the loose satin cover and lift the instrument into the windowlight. I study the neck, the backward-sloping peg-box, the scroll shaped like the inside of a child’s ear, all carved from a single piece of maple. I hold the instrument up close to my eye like a telescope, registering the dull shine of the ebony fingerboard, oiled with finger-sweat, and allow my focus to travel slowly forwards along the parallel lines of the strings down to the bridge, a thin sliver of Balkan maple from which have been cut two ears flanking the inverted heart in the centre. I spin the instrument sideways and run my eyes along the elegant inlaid purfling around the rim and then across the contours of the upper body, the table, two symmetrical wedges of spruce whose feminine curves and sinuous f-shaped sound holes give the instrument the appearance of a pair of butterfly wings, varnished with walnut oil to give a rich red glow. My gaze rests finally on the black ebony tailpiece where the ends of the strings concentrate, like nerves at the base of the spine, and the loop of gut which gathers all the tension of the instrument and deposits it onto a simple hardwood peg attached to the base.

  A voice behind me said softly, in Russian, ‘Perhaps you will play it one day.’ I turned and saw a tall man, who had entered silently by one of the doors in the suite. He had black hair and a receding hairline, and his mouth and jowls jutted forward so that they seemed of a piece with the well-padded armchairs by the window. His forehead resembled a large boulder that had slipped from its original position, compressing his features into the lower half of his face. Even so he was not unpleasant looking. He was wearing a finely-checked jacket, a black shirt without a tie, and dark trousers.

  He motioned for me to sit on one of the chairs and sat opposite me. ‘You understand Russian?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My name is David,’ he said, ‘and I am from Odessa in the Ukraine. I am travelling with another musician from Russia, Comrade Richter, for some performances in Beijing and Shanghai, but since our train passes through Harbin I had the opportunity to meet with Kasimir and Piroshka and to deliver a parcel – to deliver this violin.’

  ‘The violin is theirs?’ I asked.

  ‘It belongs to their son, Vitja. You have heard of Vitja, no? I myself have not met him.’ David leaned forward in his chair. ‘Now, please listen,’ he said, inclining his head towards me. ‘Vitja is now a very sick man – still passably well in his body, but very sick in his mind. It was my duty to inform his parents, and they are very distressed, as you would expect. It is so difficult to have . . . to have circumstances which keep you from doing what a parent would want to do for a son.’ The man was silent for a while, as if inviting me to speak. I could think of nothing to say. I felt the edge of his warm breath on my face. It was laced with unfamiliar spices. As he shifted in his chair his clothing creaked.

  ‘Where are they?’ I asked. ‘Piroshka? And Kasimir?’

  ‘They are in Comrade Richter’s suite. I asked what I could do for them, and they said I could give you your lesson for today. So you are here. Kasimir believes that soon he will have nothing more to teach you.’ The man’s face suddenly became animated and he slapped both knees with his hands and rose from his chair. ‘Shall we begin, then? What piece have you learned for today?’

  ‘ Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances,’ I said, ‘but we don’t have a piano to accompany me.’

  ‘You ask a lot of Comrade David and the Hotel Moderne,’ he said. ‘Play. I will supply piano accompaniment inside my head.’

  I took out my violin, which seemed like a toy compared to the one lying in the case by the window, and arranged my music on the stand. I closed my eyes and, envisaging Piroshka addressing the piano, counted myself in and began to play. When I had finished Comrade David clapped three times, and said, ‘Brava! Very good. You have a beautiful, natural, unforced tone. Brava!’ He cleared his throat, and went on. ‘Now let us get to work. First, your vibrato. Very good, very lyrical, but you must use it sparingly or your audience will become distracted by your skill and they will miss the point of the music. Do you understand?’

  I nodded, and Comrade David continued, ‘And you must not overdo the sighing and the glissandi. Yes, I know the violin is the natural instrument for melancholy; but it is also the natural instrument for intellectual joy. Understand?’ I nodded again. ‘Pathos, yes,’ he went on, turning on his heel and circling around an armchair, ‘but also greatness, power.’ He clenched his fist and jerked it twice in front of his face.

  I nodded a third time.

  ‘Now this piece by the beloved Bohemian – it is too playful for you, too romantic. You are a tall girl, and angular. You must try something more suited to your physique and temperament.’

  He turned and left the room, returning a minute later with a score under one arm and a violin and bow in the other hand. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you must play some Bach. Do you know Bach? I know Kasimir likes his Romantics, but you must come to terms with Bach. He is inevitable. If he did not already exist, we would have to invent him. Ha!’ He arranged the score on the music stand and started flicking through its pages. ‘This piece is for two violins. I played it in Moscow with Menuhin in 1945, just after the war. Yehudi Menuhin, you know. It was a symbol of unity with the West, I believe. He is a fine, fine violinist, and, of course, a Jew like me. A Jew from the East and a Jew from the West. How rich a symbol is that? Now, I want you to play one of the parts of the slow movement. It is a simple melody so if you do not know it you can sight-read. Do you want me to play it through first?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will try it by myself.’

  ‘Then I will count you in,’ he said. ‘Play the top line.’

  I began, haltingly in the first couple of bars, until I found the rhythm, and then more fluently. Comrade David tucked his violin under his arm and turned away from me to look out the window to the street below, calling out from time to time – but without turning his head – ‘slower’ and ‘more round’ and ‘less vibrato’ and ‘now, build, build, build, and . . . release.’

  When I had finished he turned to me and said, ‘You see what I mean? Emotion. And intellect. I see the violin as a horse, all power, all emotion, with wild eyes and sweat coating its limbs and its great heart pounding in its great chest; but you, a mere child, with no more than your intellect, with the fine muscles of your mind, with the strings of your bow, you . . . are guiding it up and down narrow ridges, through dark valleys and forests, and . . . Oh, I speak in riddles. Do you understand what I am trying to say?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, yes; I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Is that any way for a young socialist to talk? We deal with facts, with certainties, even if they are expressed by riddling old men. That is what Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao teach us, is it not?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, wondering for a moment if I had thereby called Stalin and Mao riddling old men.

  ‘And every note on this page is a fact, is it not?’ he tapped the score with the end of his bow, ‘a single autonomous fact which, with all the other notes, adds up to the larger fact of the piece?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I rest my case. Now, shall we play both parts together?’ Without waiting for me to reply, he placed his violin under his chin and plucked each string to check that it was in tune. ‘You take the first part again,’ he said, ‘and I will follow with the second.’

  I began to play, and after the first two bars he joined in, his playing curling itself around my own like a snake. After a while I was aware only of the sound of his violin beside me: an even sound, rounded off, flowing and melo
dic, deep in the bass and crystalline in the higher tones. I felt that I was not playing at all, or rather that my playing was enveloped in his. Then as the music rose to its highest peak and began its long, winding descent I began to hear my own playing again, distinct from his, the vibrato proffered and then withdrawn, the notes simple: facts without any adornment.

  We finished and the music echoed around the room for longer than I would have thought possible, as if the silver clock, the divan with its scrolled arm, the pieces of the chess set, and the distant landscapes in their frames had absorbed the sound and were humming it to themselves. I knew in that moment that what my father had said was right; that a moment of happiness can be so great that in comparison all earlier happiness could seem merely another form of sadness.

  Before either of us could speak there was the sound of polite clapping. I turned and saw that Mr Karpin had entered the room. ‘Comrade David Fiodorovich, we must go soon,’ he said. ‘The train leaves in less than an hour. I must return Miss Xiao to the apartment and you must finish packing your bags.’

  ‘Very well,’ Comrade David said, and turning to me he offered me his hand. ‘It has been a pleasure, but of course I wish the circumstances were better. Perhaps we will meet again, since, like me, you have been marked out as a socialist artist. Kasimir has begged me to find you a place in a Conservatory somewhere – with Carl Flesch in London, he suggested, or with Ginette Neveu in Paris, and I did not have the heart to tell him that both are now dead. Nevertheless I will try my best. I hope we will meet again. Now you must go.’

  I quickly returned my violin to its case, and stole another glance around the room as I walked to the door that Mr Karpin held open for me. As I turned to thank Comrade David, I found he was closing up the violin case by the window and turning the key in its small lock. ‘You must take this with you,’ he said, holding out the case and the key to Mr Karpin, but addressing himself to me. ‘I will tell Kasimir and Piroshka that I have entrusted the violin to their pupil.’ He shook my hand again, and moments later I was standing with Mr Karpin in the hallway.

  *

  Back at the empty apartment I put the violin case on the table, turned the key in the lock and gently picked up the instrument and placed it under my chin. The E-string was slightly flat, so I sat down at the piano and tuned each of the violin’s strings in turn. I was about to pick up the bow and start to play when I felt a weight on my hand, as if another hand were resting on top of mine, and a question formed in my mind: ‘But what would you play?’ The question paralysed me. As I was about to place the violin back in its case I noticed that the velvet lining bulged in several places, as if the padding beneath it were uneven. When I pressed down on the bulges with my finger, I heard the crackle of thin sheets of paper beneath. I examined the edges of the lining to see if it could be peeled back. Down one side I found that it was held in place only by a few stitches. I took a knife and gingerly cut these stitches, and pulled out from beneath the lining several small envelopes stuffed with papers. I removed the papers and spread them out on the table, having first returned the violin to its case and snapped it shut.

  They were letters, written in a neat hand in Cyrillic script, the ink a blue-black colour, the paper thin and crinkled. Except for one letter. This one was typed on the back of three sheets of manuscript paper which were half filled with handwritten notation – a series of arpeggios in the key of D-minor, and a long passage in 6/8 time – with wavy lines drawn contemptuously through them. The letter was dated October 1946. I began to read.

  My beloved Papa and Mama,

  It is my intention that this letter be sent to you only in the event that some tragedy, common or extraordinary, has overtaken me. I hope you will have some comfort at least in receiving news that my life, for the most part, has been happy and fulfilled.

  I have enclosed with this letter all the letters I have written to you but did not send for fear of placing you in danger. Some of them are letters that I have kept in my head, memorising them, and have only recently written out. The poets here have adopted this practice. For periods during the last twenty years it has been too dangerous to commit one’s serious work to paper, or to publish anything except hymns to the local gods. So we have learned to compose in our heads, and we carry around volumes of poetry up there, small libraries, each with its wizened librarian and its roaming silverfish and dark, forgotten corners, all of it encased in bone, so that if we are searched there is no possibility of being found in possession of erroneous sonnets.

  In this way Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ was carried out of the country in the head of one of her friends. I wonder if you have heard it recited. It concerns a mother waiting in line at a prison gate, hoping for a glimpse of her son.

  After my return from Irkutsk I completed my studies and have made a passable career for myself teaching at a small institute in Kronstadt, writing scholarly articles on Pushkin, and lyric poetry about the happiness to be had in the cycle of the seasons. More latterly I have been writing songs and libretti for composers. These are all based on folk stories, because as we all know Russian folk traditions speak of the lives of solid, loam-footed people, and of the happiness to be had in the cycle of the seasons.

  I have many other poems in my head, poems like Akhmatova’s. I wish someone would carry mine to America too, and publish them there. (I realise that I do not even know if you have reached America. Perhaps you are in Shanghai – but then with the war, the Japanese occupation, the ghetto, surely not . . .)

  Now to explain the violin. You should recognise it, Papa, since it is the one the young princess played when you taught her in the Aleksandr Palace at Tsarkoe Selo. It came into my possession in 1920, not long after I returned to St Petersburg (or Leningrad, as they have now renamed our city). I opened my door one night to a man who introduced himself as a former footman at the palace. He had the violin with him, wrapped in a sack. He said the Grand Duke himself had entrusted it to him in 1914, with instructions to wait until the turmoil had settled and then to deliver it into your hands, Papa, as a token of their appreciation for your tutelage of the princess. The man had stowed the violin in an attic for several years, and then began to make enquiries after your whereabouts. It took him several more years to find his way to my door. I explained that you were probably in America and promised to find a way to get the violin to you. I fed the man the dinner I had prepared for myself, and have not seen him since.

  You may recall that the Tsarina believed the violin was made in the late 18th century by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesú of Cremona, which would make it one of the most valuable in all of Russia. It is certainly a fine instrument, but I am afraid she was mistaken. I showed it recently to a violinist friend of Dmitri Dmitrievich – about whom more soon – who identified it as one of the imitation Guarneri instruments made by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume around 1860. She told me that Vuillaume’s imitations were astoundingly accurate, right down to the worn varnish and patination, and that only a tone-deaf capitalist would care that it was not a genuine Guarneri. Fritz Kreisler owns a Vuillaume, she told me, which he has given on loan to the Pole, Josef Hassid.

  I have now entrusted the violin, and my letters, to Dmitri Dmitrievich, or Mitya, as he insists I call him. He has been unreasonably generous to me, as was his uncle, Boleslav, in putting us up in Irkutsk (but I hear Boleslav is now dead, have you heard this news?). Mitya has recommended my work to several operatic composers. He himself will not write any more operas for fear that they will attract the same condemnation as his last one, which was officially described as ‘chaos instead of music’ even after it had received acclaim from the most orthodox of critics and had been performed more than a hundred times to full houses.

  I have already related this story in one of my letters. And I have also told the story of our life in Leningrad during the 1941 siege. You will see that it is true that music carried the citizens of Leningrad through the inferno. One remembers Oistrakh playing at the Bolshoi Theatre with a hole in t
he roof and a shell crater by the orchestra pit; and Klavdia Shulzhenko and her jazz band performing ‘Blue Headscarf’ and ‘Companions in Arms’ on the front lines; but most of all one remembers Mitya’s Seventh Symphony, performed one sweltering August night by members of the Radio Orchestra supplemented by soldiers on loan from army units defending the city. O, the lyricism of that symphony! elevating our patriotism into – dare I say it – the Divine light of humanism. Who would not embrace even death for that cause? Afterwards it was said on the streets in all seriousness: ‘Shostakovich is more powerful than Hitler. Berlin may have Beethoven’s Ninth, but Leningrad has Shostakovich and his Seventh.’

  But you can read this for yourselves. The war is over, but what victory have we secured? Our dignity, our composure, our pride are under threat again, and so too our lives. My situation is very fragile. To be a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is very difficult (even after the terrible, unbelievable events in Germany and Poland), and to be one who writes is even more difficult. I often dream that a large iron key has been inserted into my mouth and turned so that it scrapes against my gums and crushes my teeth and bloodies my tongue, making all speech impossible. Mitya is more secure. His fame affords him protection (though not as much as one might think) and he has the opportunity to travel out of the country, which few others have. What is more, it is not so suspicious that he should have such a fine violin in his possession.