The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  I remember little about my performance on that day, except that it seemed only partly mine. Each phrase grasped me firmly as a partner in a dance so that I felt I was being led effortlessly from hand to hand, from note to note. I heard the music, of course; but it seemed to come, not from my bow, nor from within me, but from within itself, confident and fierce and implacable in its own steady unfolding. I was conscious of time – the insistent steam-hammer march of passacaglia time – but as if it were merely the filling out of a pattern, or the synchronous resolution of all the terms in one of my father’s mathematical problems, solving and resolving itself, step by logical step. As I came to the end of the piece, there again was that question mark that had first puzzled me; that note begging for completion, that unfinished sequence of numbers, remaining alone and exposed, flailing in the wind like a prayer flag on a lonely mountainside. I lowered my violin and bow, and I remember only the sudden awareness of a trickle of sweat travelling down my back, between my shoulder blades, edging its way towards the base of my spine.

  It took a long time for the audience to respond. When it came at last, the applause was warm and generous, restrained at first, and then more energetic, goaded by the old man who had kissed my hand, who rose to his feet and shouted ‘Brava!’ several times and waved his arms in an upwards motion. The audience rose to their feet. But I knew that that last note, that lack of resolution, had troubled them, even hurt them. They were used to music that was sad, and even angry. What they were not used to was the desolation of that rootless note, which forced upon them the knowledge that they too were alone and exposed, rootless and far from the homes to which they would never return.

  Then the room came alive again with the rattle of tea cups, the clearing of throats, the shuffling of long skirts and the creaking of chairs. We drank more tea, and ate slices of something sweet made out of nuts and dried fruit. The audience started to slip away, some of them greeting Kasimir and Piroshka, while I myself sat alone with a cup and saucer on my lap. The rabbi’s widow finally came to me, took my head in her hands and planted a kiss on the crown of my head. ‘A voice, my girl,’ she said. ‘You are a voice from across the hills and the plains, and if you were not here to play to us I fear the sky would fall in upon us.’ Then she kissed me again, and moved away.

  I returned to the apartment with Kasimir and Piroshka walking silently either side of me. I did not mind that none of us spoke for the first kilometre or so. Then the silence grew oppressive. ‘Did you like it?’ I asked finally, not directing my question to either of them in particular.

  ‘It concerns my son and his suffering,’ Kasimir replied. ‘How could I possibly like it? It seizes me by the back of the neck and pushes my face towards a dark abyss.’ He could tell I was hurt by his words, and went on: ‘But your playing – that I liked. Yes. I liked your playing. It was very fine.’

  ‘And did you feel the emotion while you were playing?’ Piroshka asked. Kasimir looked sternly at his wife, and received a stern look in response. I pondered the matter for a while. What had I felt? Nothing? All of the contents of the letter? The private grief of a man living far from me in a strange city? I did not know. I had felt the music take over, take responsibility for itself.

  ‘I felt . . . nothing,’ I said. ‘Just the music. That is all.’

  Kasimir laughed gently. ‘Let that be the final answer,’ he said, and held my hand tighter as we walked on.

  *

  It was only a few weeks later that my father suffered his stroke, and shortly afterwards developed his problem with doors, which in time became a larger problem with all surfaces and distances. He began to drop things and knock over cups of tea and bowls at the table; not often, but enough so that he could no longer rely on his sense of distance and depth, and the position of his own body. He wrote in his notebook that it was as if the light around him were refracted by one or two degrees, enough to disturb his ability to navigate the space around him. Or like the experience of standing between two parallel mirrors, he went on, unable to see what it is you really want to see, trying to outsmart your own reflection, but always failing.

  At the start, my father tried hard to maintain his good humour, perhaps mainly for the sake of my mother and me. He would often make a game out of his misfortunes, deciding to be amused, even enchanted, by them. He would retrace his steps after walking into the wall, or replay some clumsy move of his hand, observing the exact point at which his perceptions had been misled, toying with it like a child playing with a mysterious object. For the first few months, he was scrupulous about apologising for his errors. He would mutter dui bu qi, ‘sorry’, whenever he upset anything or stumbled, and his eyes would seek out mine or my mother’s gently imploring a pardon, which we readily gave. He would even apologise when he was alone, and I would sometimes be woken by the sound of him moving around the house at night apologising to a chair, a door, a cup – dui bu qi, dui bu qi . . . dui bu qi. But he soon grew depressed at his illness, and refused to talk about it, except obliquely. He stopped apologising, and sometimes I suspected that he dropped items (especially clattering metallic ones) deliberately, out of frustration and anger.

  One day while out walking he told me the story of the sage, Chuang Tzu, who dreamed he was a butterfly and then realised that the butterfly was dreaming it was Chuang Tzu. When he awoke he was no longer sure which he was: dreaming butterfly or dreaming man. At the time I thought the story was silly, and told my father so. He seemed disappointed. He was trying to tell me something, and needed me to understand. But he could not say it to me directly. The conversation ended abruptly, and we completed our walk in silence. Now of course I know that he was referring to the slow horror of losing his confidence even in what he thought he saw and thought he knew.

  Is this the girl who is my daughter?

  Is this the hand that is my hand?

  The face that is my face?

  The thoughts that are my thoughts?

  *

  We passed the final months of 1950 in a kind of dull trance. My mother began to work a night shift, so we rarely occupied the house as a threesome. I did my school work, attended music lessons, and played at the Harbin Musical Society and for visiting Party bosses and delegations of Russian and Czech technical advisors. My father divided his time between his work and the heated kang. Indeed the bed became the centre of our lives. One of us was always asleep on it, or huddling beneath its blankets and quilts trying to read or to eat. We shared an unspoken pact to keep the fire alight, and our connection to each other as a family became, for a while, simply this repeated act of stoking its burner with kindling or lumps of coal. We rarely talked, like passengers forced to share a sleeping compartment on a train, speaking only to explain our actions, when that was necessary, and never sharing our thoughts.

  In the spring, my father came out of his depression and resurrected his plan to build a fish pond. His own strength was clearly not up to the physical labours involved, so he enlisted the help of Zhu Shaozen, a former colleague with whom he had shared a small hut in the forest during his years attempting to rebuild the Harbin Communist Party. Zhu was still a young man – in his early thirties – but he had a damaged exterior. He had lost one ear and most of his front teeth. One eye had been punctured by a sliver of shrapnel and it now wandered at liberty around his eye socket. And years of malnutrition and its attendant diseases had left him with wisps of hair like a morning mist around his skull and a permanently sallow complexion which added another ten years to his appearance and put beyond him any hope of marriage or family, despite the redeeming effect of the rather smart black suit which he wore day in day out (acquired, he admitted unashamedly, from the wardrobe of a deceased Jewish businessman).

  Zhu explained that he had unwisely forfeited his rights to his ear in a card game with the commanding officer of a POW camp, and that it had been removed using the bayonet of a Nationalist guard. ‘I was so sure of my hand that I bet my tongue as well,’ he said, ‘but I was losing so
much blood from my ear they decided to stop.’

  ‘Tell me the name of the officer,’ my father said. ‘I will get Party headquarters to track him down so you can pay the other half of the wager.’

  Every morning for several weeks during the spring of 1951, Zhu arrived at our house, along with his nephew, a boy of around ten. In contrast to his sharply dressed uncle, the boy wore, above his bare, stubby feet, a pair of heavy gabardine trousers that had been inexpertly taken in along the seams and crotch, and two woollen jerseys sewn together with string to form a single, moth-eaten garment. Zhu would immediately strip off his suit jacket, shirt and trousers, roll them into a tight cylinder, which he entrusted to his nephew, and descend with a small shovel into a hole of ever increasing depth, from time to time winching up a bucketload of earth for the boy to tip into a corner of the courtyard. Sometimes, when my father was too sick to go to work, he watched the excavation, dressed in an old pair of pyjamas and smoking his way through his ration of Party-issue cigarettes, giving some to the boy to ease his cough. He and Zhu carried on an unceasing conversation, shouted to and from the bottom of the well. The topic was always the same: the hardships and the triumphs of the military campaigns against Japan and the Nationalists; the history that had delivered them both (unlike many of their colleagues) into the present moment with their lives intact.

  The work progressed slowly. Some days Zhu was too sick to work, and some days his nephew, whose chest, at the best of times, gave off a high-pitched sound not unlike a badly tuned radio. Another day was lost to a dust storm that billowed through the streets of the city on its way south, and the next to a thunderstorm that followed in the wake of the dust and filled the bottom third of the well with red-stained water. The well eventually connected with the water table and proved viable, whereupon Zhu brought in several bags of cement on the back of a mule-cart and began to shape the walls of the trough. My father and I took a bus to the river bank and collected smooth stones which we embedded in the top of the walls. My mother acquired some leftover paint from the hospital; a pale blue-green colour we all agreed was perfect, but it only covered the bottom of the trough and two sides, so we left it at that.

  Where the pond abutted the well, Zhu constructed the small water-race my father had designed, with a shallow cistern at the top fed by an electric pump which recycled water from the bottom of the trough, and a slope piled with more river stones through which the falling water trickled. I was charged with checking the water level every day, and replenishing it from the well if it fell much below the lip of the trough.

  Once he was satisfied that the system worked, my father hired a small row-boat and he, Zhu and I spent a day on the river catching fish in a net and storing them in jars of milky river water on the floor of the boat. Zhu claimed to be knowledgeable about the different species, and told us which ones to keep and which to discard. We caught baby pike, loach, whitefish, grass carp, and a catfish, which leapt around in the bottom of the boat snapping at our feet, so that we jumped about and almost capsized the boat. At dusk we landed the boat and rattled home on the bus with about forty captive fingerlings and a few larger fish, and released them into their new home. ‘Grow fat,’ my father whispered to them as he tipped them into the pond. ‘I promise ten thousand years of good luck to whichever of you first graces our table.’

  That night my father and Zhu sat by the pond late into the night, drinking and smoking and listening to our classical records and a recording of massed choirs singing revolutionary songs. I sat with them for a while, and played some tunes for them on my violin, and when my mother arrived home our neighbours joined us all by the pond. They produced an early-season watermelon and we sat in the moonlight enveloped in the smells of tobacco, red melon flesh and spring pollen, and we dipped our hands into the pond, hoping to stroke the glistening scales of our new charges.

  *

  As time went on my father’s panic attacks continued, and he decided to deflect his sense of embarrassment by turning it into data ‘for the advancement of science and the good of the people’. He revealed the diary he had kept since his illness began, and would ask my mother or me – or a work colleague, if an attack occurred there – to help him write down his experiences as accurately as possible.

  My mother gave me the diary after he died, when I was in Shanghai. I read it often during the years that followed. It described the day he discovered that someone had filled the fish pond with cement, and the difficulty he had in accepting my assurances that this was not in fact the case. It recorded his astonishment when he discovered that my playing restored to him the transparent surface of the fish pond, so that he could once again select a fish for dinner. He put the gramophone beside the pond to see if recorded music had the same effect. But this did not work; the healing music had to be performed live, he concluded. He discovered eventually that if he sat by the pond and closed his eyes and then whistled a familiar tune until he was lost in the music, he could sometimes open one eye and slip his hand into the water to catch a fish.

  He told everyone that the diary had already been accepted for publication by the China Journal of Medicine, who were merely awaiting its completion. One of my favourite entries read:

  On March 27th Comrade Lu rides his bicycle to work, but finds he cannot stop at the railway station, and instead continues cycling around the city, unable despite all efforts to instruct his legs to cease pedalling. This continues for another hour, only ceasing when he finally faints with exhaustion. He speculates on why his mind would not allow him to interrupt the rhythmic movement of his legs on the pedals. This automaton behaviour is something the Party should investigate further. As for Comrade Lu, applying scientifically his technique of touching door-posts, he finds that he can stop his bicycle if he touches a tree branch or some other item fixed to the ground. This also is worthy of investigation.

  A week later he wrote:

  Comrade Lu forms the hypothesis that he might ride with his daughter sitting on the crossbar playing her violin. Perhaps, he thinks, the completion of a piece of music would provide the opportunity for his mind to override the automaton response and to successfully stop his bicycle. This hypothesis remains at the testing stage, as, for the time being, regardless of how she is seated on the crossbar, Comrade Lu’s daughter pokes him in the face with her bow.

  And the following day:

  An alternative must be found to carrying his daughter and her violin on his bicycle. The crossbar position leads to injuries to his face and chest from her bow, and if she sits on the carrier behind him this produces such a bumpy ride as to make playing music impossible. Comrade Lu is therefore experimenting with whistling familiar tunes to himself while riding, hoping that he will be able to stop himself at the moment the tune reaches its conclusion. To his surprise this has worked passably well, and he has now assembled a repertoire that takes him to the door of the China Eastern Railway at his normal leisurely pace, and a shorter repertoire for those days when, due to pressing affairs or a shower of rain, he has to hurry.

  One thing the notebook did not record was the conversation my father and I had at dusk one evening by the fish pond. ‘Did you know,’ he began, ‘that the ancients believed that the sky was a vast water-drop clinging to the edge of heaven?’ He withdrew his hand from the pond and held it up to his face, waiting for the water to drain from his fingers, except for one drop which rolled to the end of his index finger. He gazed intently at the drop of water. ‘And they believed, with some justification, that it was held in place, like this drop on my finger, by a thin membrane, which let rain through small holes. They believed that the membrane could be burst by the misdeeds of evil or foolish princes, and that this was what caused the great floods.’

  He noticed an insect perched on a stone at the edge of the pond, and held his finger over it. The water drop wobbled around underneath his finger, but would not break, until finally my father touched the insect with the drop, rupturing its surface and releasing a tiny deluge over
the creature. ‘I have become something of an expert on the origin of floods,’ he said, ‘and the remedies for them. Floods are wonderful mathematical phenomena, and they have a strange and terrifying beauty.’

  ‘Surely it was not true,’ I said. ‘What they said about the sky was not true.’

  ‘It was not true, no,’ he said, ‘but what a beautiful thought! The ancients had many beautiful thoughts, and when I reflect I realise I have spent my life amongst people with beautiful thoughts, who are convinced that what is beautiful must also be true – not that they would ever use those words. And in the years to come what great works may result from this mad pursuit of beauty?

  ‘As for the sky, Mao Zedong has said that women hold up half the sky. Do you believe that? Mao is hardly being scientific. And who holds up the other half? Men, perhaps? I am not so sure. Men are too busy with other matters, so perhaps the other half of the sky is held up by all these fragile things, like virtue and duty and music.

  ‘Do you recall our conversation about mathematics and music? How Confucius taught that mathematics is the foundation of music? Well, it has just occurred to me that while the two are linked he may have got the order wrong, that music may in fact be the foundation of mathematics. Now think about that!’

  I must have looked puzzled, for my father broke into a gentle laugh and said, ‘You must forgive me. How can I be of any use to the masses unless I express my thoughts more plainly?’

  7. Shanghai 1955

  In 1955, when I was thirteen years old, I left Harbin to study at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The Conservatory was housed in a clump of grand brick buildings with stone trim in the midst of one of the old foreign concessions. It was surrounded by similar examples of mercantile splendour, Georgian and Edwardian houses where, in the days when Shanghai was the gorgeous painted nipple on China’s breast (before the Japanese occupation brought an end to their party), traders from the French and British middle classes had played at being members of the upper classes. The Conservatory had all but disappeared during the civil war and the early years of the People’s Republic, but our Soviet brother had now sent a consignment of Russian teachers, part of an army of five thousand ‘technical advisors’ sent to build laboratories and teach at universities, and the call had gone out for young musicians from the whole of China to form the musical vanguard of the next generation. Somehow my name was on the list – I suspect that Comrade David had something to do with it – and a letter arrived at Communist Party headquarters in Harbin, inviting Xiao Magou, member of the Communist Youth League, to study at the Conservatory.