In case I harboured any doubts about going, one by one those around me whispered reasons why I should take up the opportunity. Now that Stalin was dead, Piroshka told me, there was a possibility that she and Kasimir might return to Russia to care for Vitja, and if so they would depart suddenly and without warning, and would never return. My father said simply that it would be a great honour to him and to my mother if I were to go. But it was my mother, late one night, who got me out of bed, poured me a cup of tea and took me into the courtyard by the fish pond, where she whispered to me that she and my father were coming under suspicion in the Anti-Rightist Campaign. When I asked how this could possibly be, she told me for the first time the story of her marriage to Yao Xijiu, the son of a capitalist and member of the landlord class.
‘But that was many years ago,’ I said, ‘before I was born.’
‘And then there are my links to the Russian community,’ she said.
‘But the Russians are our friends,’ I said, ‘our older brother.’
‘Not the White Russians,’ she corrected me, ‘and soon the Red Russians will perhaps not be our friends anymore. The times are very confusing.’
I asked her why my father was under suspicion. He was a Party member of long standing, had fought in the war of liberation, had served the people tirelessly, and was still a Party Secretary. My mother looked into her tea cup for a while, at the slow circling dance of the tea leaves on the surface. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said at last. ‘Simply to be in his position means you must have enemies.’
I confronted my father on his alleged misdeeds the next morning as he was leaving the house. He put his finger to my lips and turned to get his bicycle. I ran after him and seized the handlebars so he could not leave. We struggled for a while, and I was surprised to find that he was no longer strong enough to wrest the handlebars from my grasp. He relaxed, and took one of my hands and started to write characters on my palm with his finger. They were the six characters of a proverb he had taught me years before:
When crows find a dying snake, they become like eagles.
‘Now you have made me late for work,’ he said sharply. ‘Give me a push off.’ He lifted his leg awkwardly over the bicycle, and I pushed him along the street until he gathered momentum. As I turned away I heard him ring his bell several times, and, thinking he was summoning me, I turned back. I was mistaken. He was ringing the bell so that he could find his note and begin to whistle once more, in D-minor, the jaunty, happy-sad melody of Ge-lei-su’s Liebesleid.
*
I left Harbin during the harvest time. There had been an especially good crop of leeks. Truckloads had been brought into the city the day before and more or less given away. The Party newspaper advised – perhaps, ordered – that the vegetables be preserved for the winter by twisting them into a knot and leaving them outside to dry in the late autumn sun for at least a week, and as a result the morning I walked to the railway station with Kasimir and Piroshka, carrying a small suitcase and my violin, every flat surface in the neighbourhood – every window ledge and lintel, every stone balustrade, the sides of every doorstep, the roof of every coal shed and bicycle shelter – was covered in a layer of these drying vegetables. Tired from a night with little sleep, I was soon lulled into a doze by the motion of the train as we made our way south towards Beijing, and I dreamt that I was sitting in the train carriage by myself, looking out the window. My violin and bow were once again incorporated into my arms. And everywhere – outside on the ground and the ledges of the buildings, far away on the twisted onion-dome of St Sofia’s Cathedral, and inside the carriage as well, on the seat next to me, the netted luggage-rack above my head, and the floor beneath my feet – lay a carpet of these green vegetables, each tied into a crisp knot: an overnight snowfall of tiny strangled corpses.
*
And so late one night at the end of September of 1955 my train shuffled slowly into Shanghai. I had instructions to wait in the arrival hall for a woman called Madame Huang who was to take me to my lodgings. As it happened she was standing behind me as I manoeuvred myself and my luggage down the steps of the carriage. She was a small, round woman with wiry grey hair and a permanent smile that I would soon discover was an accident of her facial bones, rather than a sign of her disposition. She had been born with a smile, and could not shake it. She shook my hand and in the same instant took my suitcase from the platform between us. She led me through the crowd to the station entrance, tossed my suitcase into a bicycle-rickshaw, ordered me to climb in and barked instructions to the driver. She followed in another rickshaw, shouting out directions when my driver appeared about to take a wrong turn.
We swayed for half an hour along wide thoroughfares lit with ornate streetlights, and then down narrow unlit streets where two rickshaws could hardly pass each other, and where the sounds and smells of family life spilled out of open windows. It was late, so most of the apartments and shops we passed were in darkness, but there were still signs of life – loud conversations from above, clusters of people taking a walk in the hot clammy air, and men sitting by windows smoking or quietly ruminating. An old man lounged on a doorstep, dressed in shorts and a singlet he had pulled up over his belly so that he could cool his skin with a fan. In his other hand he held a folded newspaper, squinting to read it in the light of a single bulb above the doorway.
I had just fallen into a kind of tossing sleep when we arrived at the entrance of the Foreign Teachers’ Building. Madame Huang paid the rickshaw drivers, carried my suitcase to the entrance and greeted the concierge roughly in a dialect I did not understand. Then she took my violin case from me, muttering something about bricks in my suitcase and pain in her back, and disappeared up a damp stairwell into complete darkness. I dragged my suitcase after her, feeling along the cold concrete walls with my fingertips, stumbling on the irregularly pitched steps. Up ahead Madame Huang began to talk to me, but faintly, as if she thought I was by her side. I sped up and bumped my head into her bony buttock, at which she grunted. These would be only temporary lodgings for me, she was saying. There was no room at the dormitory where most of the Conservatory students lived. This was where the Russian teachers were to stay. They would each have a small suite of rooms to themselves – bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and sitting room – whereas I was to share a small room on the top floor with another student. I would be moved, she said, as soon as space was available elsewhere.
I had lost count of the landings when Madame Huang announced that we had arrived on the seventh floor. Some starlight filtered in from a window, but otherwise we were in complete darkness. Madame Huang knocked once on a door and pulled me into a room. I felt the greasy aromatic warmth of a sleeping body. ‘Ling Ling,’ Madame Huang called. ‘Where are you?’
There was a rustling of sheets on a mattress, and a sigh of irritation. ‘Over here,’ a girl’s voice came out of the darkness to our left.
‘Miss Xiao is here,’ Madame Huang said. ‘Where is her bunk?’
‘Come towards the window,’ Ling Ling said. ‘It’s to your right – the bottom bunk.’
‘Here,’ Madame Huang said to me, and clutched for my hand. ‘Put your things here and get some sleep. Ling Ling will show you where to go in the morning. Remember the instruction session at eight o’clock sharp. Don’t be late.’ With that Madame Huang put my violin case on the floor and retreated to the door. Soon the sounds of her descent died away. I sat in the darkness on my mattress, and after a while Ling Ling whispered from above me, ‘There’s a bucket with a lid outside the door if you want to go. It’s too late to wash yourself. The water is shut off at nine. I can light you a candle if you really want one.’
I declined the candle and thanked her, and partly undressed before swinging myself onto the lumpy mattress and pulling the single sheet over me. It was a strange feeling, but not an unpleasant one – being alone in the dark in a strange city, surrounded by people my age, musicians too, with the promise of a new life to begin in the morning. I fell asleep qu
ickly, my face licked by gushes of wet warm air from the open window adjacent to my head.
The next morning I was woken by Ling Ling’s hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s late,’ she said, ‘I have slept in. We need to go now or we’ll get nothing to eat.’ Ling Ling showed me the tap in the hall way where hot water was available for two hours in the morning and two at night. I noticed that our floor of the building was in fact a recent addition, a makeshift extra storey built of brick and plaster.
After I had dressed, Ling Ling led me downstairs and introduced me to the concierge before taking my hand and pulling me quickly along the street and around the corner to the Conservatory. She explained on the way that she was a pianist from the city of Suzhou, and that this was her second year at the Conservatory. She was several years older than me, although when I stood beside her she only came up to the level of my cheekbones.
The refectory doubled as a meeting hall, and when we arrived the tables were being cleared and forms were being arranged in rows. The room had large double casement windows along one wall through which bright sunlight shone in angled shafts, disturbed by the flickering shadows of the foliage in the courtyard outside. The food counter was at the back of the room, and the other two walls were covered in revolutionary banners, an array of large framed photographs, and big character posters, all of which I attempted to read as Ling Ling pulled me towards the food: Follow the Leadership of the Party of Lenin, Marxism in One Sentence: Revolution is Justified, Celebrate Paul Robeson’s Birthday, Welcome Comrade Tikhon Khrennikhov. Ling Ling implored the cook to give us some breakfast despite our lateness, talking sweetly first in Mandarin, and then switching to the Shanghai dialect. The cook refused to meet her gaze until she started to point to me, seizing me by the upper arm in an attempt to demonstrate my urgent need for feeding. The cook looked at me as if I were a wounded bird, knitted her brows in concern and began making coo-ing noises. She then disappeared to an adjacent store-room and returned with a small billy in one hand, half full of cold thin soup, and in the other hand some rubbery bread stuffed with bean paste.
‘What did you say to her?’ I asked Ling Ling as we sat on one of the forms and ate.
‘That you were from the Northeast, and arrived late last night,’ she said. ‘And in case that wasn’t enough, I said that there has been a famine where you lived and that your father was a hero in the Korean War and was killed in a plane crash last week.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But what do I do if my father comes to visit?’
Ling Ling smiled and did not answer because she had caught the attention of a friend who had just entered the room, and was waving sweetly, her hand circling around as if she were washing a window. I felt a surge of envy for her delicate, knowing beauty, jiao mei, as we say, ‘peach pretty’: her oval face with its sharp chin, her double-lidded eyes the shape of almonds, her complexion the colour and texture of an under-ripe stone-fruit. But suddenly she pulled her bottom lip to one side in consternation at something she had seen over my shoulder, and the whole effect vanished, slid into discord, like a hairline crack in a porcelain vase that is only visible when a gentle pressure is applied.
As the room began to fill up, Ling Ling explained to me that normal classes had been suspended during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. ‘Today is the second day of the anti-Debussy campaign,’ she said. ‘They are going to criticise Debussy’s music as bourgeois spiritual pollution.’ Ling Ling could not say exactly why Debussy was being criticised, except that it had to do with being bourgeois. ‘It’s a shame,’ she said, furrowing her perfect brows. ‘I used to play Debussy all the time. My mother taught it to me. Then they found out how bad his music was.’
‘Couldn’t you tell that it was bad music when you played it?’ I asked.
‘Of course not. Badness can be very subtle,’ Ling Ling said. ‘Without political instruction it’s easy to miss it.’
Ling Ling’s last words were whispered to me, as a young man was standing on the podium at the front of the room calling everyone to attention. He had a pile of posters at his feet bearing slogans painted in large, red characters, and asked for volunteers to attach them to the walls of the room. Those in the front rows immediately stood and rushed at the pile of posters, and began to attach them to the wall, obscuring the posters that were already there. The new posters decried Debussy’s music and political errors, as did many of those they now covered over.
Ling Ling noticed me looking around the room and the two hundred or so people. ‘These are all the students and faculty of the Conservatory,’ she said. ‘And those are the first of the Russian advisors, who arrived two days ago.’ She pointed to three men and one woman sitting together at the front of the room, and then identified the faculty members, although she could not see the Director, Professor Ho Luting. The young man who had brought the posters was Yu Huiyong, a new professor who specialised in Chinese opera. Once the posters were hung around the walls, it was Yu Huiyong who called the room to order, and began to speak. Claude Debussy was an effete aristocrat, he said, a landlord, a comprador, a bourgeois reactionary, and not a friend of the French people. Weren’t all composers enemies of the people? Certainly not! By comparison, Mozart was a musical nationalist who pioneered the use of the German language in opera, and, by his famous departure from Salzburg, rebelled against the feudal order controlling music. He pointed to one of the posters on the back wall, and got us all to repeat what it said several times: ‘Celebrate January 1956 – the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.’
‘Debussy’s music is like French pastry,’ Yu went on, ‘all sugar and fat, but no substance. When the poor people of France had come to Claude Debussy’s door complaining that they had run out of bread, Debussy had said to his servant, “But why don’t they eat pastry?”’ Yu paused, and there was silence for a moment before the room erupted into laughter in response to some cue I had not picked up.
Yu continued detailing the sins of Debussy for another half hour, pausing every few sentences to allow us to rise to our feet and demand that his music be burned and his memory erased. I recalled Piroshka’s frank histories of the lives of the great composers, and wondered whether any of them could survive such scrutiny. But Professor Yu obliged with a list of Western composers and artists who, although not necessarily Marxist, nevertheless demonstrated a correct approach to life and music. Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Paul Robeson, Brahms, Glinka, Dvorak, Massenet, Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin. It seemed to me a strange list, lacking Bach, Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Paganini, not to mention my father’s beloved Fritz Kreisler; and including Schubert, the brilliant but dissolute syphilitic. And who, I thought, was Paul Robeson? I was heartened to see one of the Russian advisors wince at the list, and others – who did not appear to have good Chinese – look puzzled and bend their heads to one of their colleagues for a translation.
After Professor Yu finished speaking, he invited a young man from the audience to join him on the podium. I heard Ling Ling emit a quiet gasp beside me as a slender, handsome man in shirtsleeves stood up before the crowd. ‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘That is Tian Mei Yun,’ she said. ‘He is a pianist and a cellist, from my home town.’ Tian began to speak; he had a fluty voice, nasal, but always resolving itself to softness, like a warm mist spreading across a lake, or the ‘beautiful cloud’ of his given name. He spoke of his upbringing in a middle-class intellectual family in Suzhou, and his early introduction to the piano. His uncle had taught him to play Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he said, but had not been alert to musical error and had one day brought home some Debussy, and required Tian to play it. This had been a disaster for the family, Tian said. His uncle made him learn the entire book of Debussy’s music and perform pieces to guests. The children of the household had been unable to concentrate on their studies. The adults had begun to act selfishly, to neglect their civic duties, and squabble amongst themselves. Marriages dissolved, generations fell into bickering, and two of his cousins died of a fever.
&nb
sp; It was only after his uncle was killed in a road accident, along with an unknown young woman whose relatives never claimed her body, that the family began to perform its duties and salvage some dignity. ‘Down with Debussy!’ he shouted. ‘Down with spiritual pollution!’ And he sat down amidst more applause. Ling Ling turned to me with tears in her eyes and made as if to say something, but the words did not come.
The session continued all morning, with speaker after speaker getting up to match or better Tian’s story, as the heat grew intense and the air hung heavy with the smell of perspiration, pressed back down upon us by the ceiling fans which swung precariously to and fro above our heads. A young man rose and opened the windows to let out the rank air, and a cooler breeze entered the room, and with it the sound of birds singing in the courtyard outside. He slunk back to his seat, shielding his eyes with his hand as if fearful of having committed an error. The windows stayed open.
At midday the doors on the kitchen counter scraped open noisily, spilling the smell of burnt rice and cabbage into the room. The meeting was adjourned, and the Russians rose to their feet as one, some of them stretching and yawning. Ling Ling stood up on the form and scanned the crowd. ‘I want you to meet Tian Mei Yun,’ she said. ‘I can’t see where he has gone.’
The Phoenix Song Page 17