‘That is the problem with you men, always limited by your mothers!’
‘You too have a mother. I can vouch for it; I have even met her.’
‘And eaten her beef tongue?’ Mitrofan asked.
‘Which, I assure you, my mother would cook in whatever implement came to hand, and little Pavlik here would eat it with pickled vegetables and vodka until all hours of the night, sucking the jelly from his fingers up to the knuckle. Yes, exactly like that! Look, everyone! Disgusting, isn’t it! No, Pavel, let me go! You have drunk too much! Now, give me that water jug, Kolya. And give me another glass of vodka, before you drink the lot. Thank you. Don’t pull that face at me! You know what Chekhov says about women drinking: always vodka or brandy and always the best. Now how do we light this thing? Who has a match?’
‘I am going to bed,’ Pavel groaned. ‘I have to teach my first class in the morning.’
‘Ah, no you don’t, Pavel,’ Kolya sighed. ‘It’s Criticise Debussy Day again.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Director Ho told me.’
‘Christ! I thought we’d banished poor Claude to the tenth circle of Hades. Do they want to push him even further down, to the realm of the pederasts and traitors? Well, I might stay up then, if only to make sure nobody eats my share. How long will this thing take to cook?’
‘About three hours, I’d say.’
‘Christ Almighty!’
‘And all his angels!’ added Mitrofan.
‘Profane tonight, aren’t we! Find those matches or it will be four hours.’
‘But we don’t have enough vodka to last four hours.’
‘I am named for Mitrofan the Blessed of Voronezh, Patron Saint of Blasphemy. I can blaspheme all I want!’
‘We can water it down,’ Raya said.
‘The tongue or the vodka?’
‘Or the blasphemy?’
‘There! It is lit. Now unwrap the tongue. Don’t drop it, Pavel, you idiot!’
‘I can’t help it. It’s slippery!’
‘Aha, a case of lingua lapsis!’
‘Very funny, Kolya,’ Pavel’s voice.
‘What?’
‘A slip of the tongue, Raya! Where is your Latin? Ha!’
‘Did you hear that everyone?’ Pavel said. ‘A comic genius at our helm. That’s auspicious.’
‘Are you sure it’s fresh, Mitrofan? That slime worries me and it looks green in this light. Let me smell it. Pah! You did bring this across the continent in your suitcase, didn’t you!’
‘Of course it’s fresh. My friend the Jew assured me it is.’
‘Here we are!’ Raya said. ‘The burner is lit, and tongue is cooking, the lid is back on – our ship is launched! More vodka for a toast!’
‘The bottle is finished.’ Pavel’s voice, followed by a collective sigh.
‘Well then, beloved comrades,’ Kolya’s voice now, ‘my duty lies heavy upon me. I will show some leadership here. I have another bottle of vodka in my room. I will get it.’
‘It is you who are the saint, Kolya.’
‘Give me that candle then.’
Moments later Kolya burst from the room into the stairwell, shielding a candle with his hand, and walked towards me. I had time to do nothing more than rise to my feet and give the appearance that I was descending the stairs. As I passed close to him I noted his tightly clipped beard and half-moon spectacles and a shirt that opened at the collar to reveal a burr of greying chest hair. He swayed slightly and muttered ‘ni hao’ to me. I descended to the floor below and waited for him to return with his bottle of vodka, but after ten minutes standing in complete darkness I decided to retrace my steps. The door of the apartment was still open, and candlelight flickered across the vestibule curtain like a display of the northern lights, but the voices within were stilled. A warm, meaty smell wafted into the stairwell. I waited a while before climbing to the next floor and then two more floors, until I found the door of an apartment open, but all inside was darkness. I bent my head to the doorframe and heard a faint sound of heavy breathing.
*
The next morning on my way downstairs I noted the name plates beside the apartments: Nikolai Golden on the sixth floor, Mitrofan Tretyakov on the fifth, Fyodor Meretrenko and his wife Ksenia on the fourth, and on the third, Pavel Gachev and Raya Vishinsky. All the names were printed in Russian, with a clumsy transliteration into Chinese characters.
As instructed I reported the night’s events to Madame Huang, who noted down the details, and asked me to repeat my story at several points. A tongue? Pushkin? Who is he? How much vodka? She said she would have a stern talk to the student who was assigned to guide Mitrofan, and I pointed out that it was the Russian, and not his guide, who had sought out the White Russian’s shop. Madame Huang nodded several times and made to write something down, but then stopped herself. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘Indeed you are. I think we will leave things alone and simply observe. No, to the contrary,’ and she pressed her teeth forwards into her grand smile, ‘I shall commend him for his initiative in taking Comrade Tretyakov to see his countrymen across the river. This could be very useful indeed!’ She thanked me and told me to continue.
Nikolai Golden, or Kolya, had been correct, I was dismayed to find. That day’s classes were indeed cancelled once more to allow the anti-Debussy campaign to continue. Students and faculty sat meekly in the refectory hall as a series of rainstorms brought some relief from the heat, rattling on the windows in a kind of angry counterpoint to the morning’s sessions of criticism, led once more, and with particular passion, by Professor Yu.
Early in the afternoon session, after we had chanted slogans against Debussy for half an hour, Director Ho rose to make another speech. He had been sitting quietly near the front for the entire morning, placidly attentive to each speaker. Then, as the rain gave way to sticky heat and those around him began to tug on their shirt fronts and fan their faces with spare anti-Debussy pamphlets, I noticed him take up a pencil and start to scribble some notes on a sheet of paper. When he finished he made his way to the podium, gave us his stern face with a hint of theatricality, and began: ‘Now that the errors of Claude Debussy are beyond doubt, what is our duty as musicians and composers? What instruction should we take from the bad example of Debussy? Do bourgeois characteristics lie hidden in our music?’
Director Ho dropped his head and allowed his questions to hang in the air. I was not sure if he was waiting for someone in the audience to volunteer a response, and I started to formulate an answer in case I was called upon. There were several stifled coughs and some barely perceptible whispering; but then Director Ho looked up again.
‘In China we have always known that to make music is a political act. The ancients believed that music affected both Heaven and Earth. Music was aligned with Heaven, with light, with the male principle, and with the Yang; while the sacred rites were linked to the Earth, to obscurity, the female principle, and the Yin.
‘Mao Zedong expressed the truth more succinctly, when he said, “All culture belongs to a definite class and party, and has a definite political line.” Our brothers in the Soviet Union have recognised the same thing. One of their composers, Dmitri Shostakovich, has said, “There can be no music without ideology. We, as revolutionaries, have a different conception of music from the composers of other countries. Lenin himself said that music is a means of unifying people, and eliminating the differences that hold them apart.” Concerning his own composition, Shostakovich says, “I always try to make myself understood as widely as possible, and if I do not succeed, I consider it my own fault.”’
Director Ho’s round glasses flashed moonbeams around the room. ‘So, for a socialist,’ he continued, ‘bad music is not simply an aesthetic problem; it is a moral and political problem. Bad music harms its listeners and their society. Confucius recorded the story of King Zhou of Shang who commissioned a salacious work, “The Mulberry Grove above the Pu River”. After the performance, the administr
ation of the kingdom became dissolute; the people wandered about haplessly, vilified their superiors, and neglected their work. As a result the state collapsed, and the composer, seeing the people ruined, threw himself into a river and drowned.
‘We read also in the ancient annals of Duke Ling of Wei, who, when visiting Duke Ping of Qin, urged his friend to order his music master to play tunes that were spiritually too potent for the unperfected virtues of young dukes and a pleasure-soaked court. Even during the performance, dark cranes appeared over the palace as an omen. The musicians and the court soothsayers became distressed, and many guests and courtiers fled; but the dukes persisted. As the last note was struck, a torrent of rain unleashed itself upon the lands of Wei and Qin, and all was lost in the floods that followed.
‘We must not repeat these mistakes!’ he shouted, looking down at his notes first, and then looking up and surveying the room over the top of his glasses. He paused and his eyes searched the room again, and I heard a metallic rattling from the corridor and turned, with everyone else, to watch two students manoeuvre a three-legged iron brazier through the door and up the aisle to the podium. Director Ho watched as they set it down on the floor, after which one of them handed him a sheaf of papers tied up in string. ‘We will not repeat these mistakes, comrades.’ And with that he tore the string from the papers and held up the top one for us to see. ‘The Préludes,’ he announced. ‘Debussy’s Préludes.’ He tucked the score under his arm and produced a book of matches, struggling with them at his chest until he produced, like a conjuror, a sputtering flame. There was a gasp from amongst the Russians as Director Ho dangled the Préludes over the flame until one corner of it ignited and began to burn brightly, sending black ribbons of smoke up to the ceiling. The room fell silent, not a whisper or a breath, and we listened only to the soft, efficient roar of the flames as the paper curled and writhed, and Debussy’s quavers and breves melted and blackened and turned to grey dust. I glanced across at Tian and noticed his Adam’s apple quiver, then at Ling Ling and saw her eyes wide and her lip pulled unattractively to one side.
Director Ho held the score until the flame began to lick his fingers. He dropped it into the brazier and then produced another score from his pile. ‘“The Happy Island”,’ he announced, and dropped it into the flames. He held out the next score and the next, announcing the title of each piece in turn before dropping it into the brazier: announcing them brightly, as if they were being performed rather than summoned for execution. The fire hissed and spat, and ghost-birds of blackened paper rose with the heat and sought out the ceiling. Some were caught and savaged by the fans, falling upon our heads in a shower of tiny black snowflakes. Several rows in front of me I saw the only woman amongst the Russians, Raya I assumed, touch her lips with her fingers. The others, the men, observed impassively, barely blinking. Along the row from me a charred butterfly settled gracefully onto the outstretched palms of a student, weightless and crimped, lines of arpeggios still legible as silver threads embroidered on a black field. He stared at it for a moment, as if committing the notes to memory, before closing his hands over it and mashing it into dust.
Over the next half-hour, five, ten, twenty scores disappeared into the brazier. Director Ho’s forehead and neck became red with his work, and although I studied his face carefully throughout his performance it never once showed anything but anger and indignation against the foreign spiritual pollution printed onto the pages that passed through his fingers. Finally he wound the string that had held the scores neatly around two fingers and put it away in his pocket. Yu Huiyong sat quietly by the podium, his chin in his hands. Outside the rain started up again. Gusts of wind came in through the windows and, with a flurry of light and smoke, conjured from the brazier a half-burned page – a firebird which danced jerkily over our heads, flapping its blackened wings, making a desperate bid for freedom before falling to the floor, scattering sparks along the floorboards and making several hissing lurches towards the door. A student made a move towards it, to stamp it out, but his neighbour held him back, and we all kept our seats and watched the fugitive creature as it was carried along another metre by a gust of wind before coming to rest and, in a final act of defiance and resignation, immolating itself in a burst of flame which burned deep scorch marks into the floor boards and then falling in on itself, a mess of blackness and writhing orange maggots.
Director Ho moved back to the podium, his cheeks flushed and sweat glistening on his brow. ‘Now that we have dealt with Debussy, let us continue,’ he said. ‘Many of you will know the story of how the Yellow Emperor – the first and greatest of all the emperors – established a standard pitch, based upon the song of the phoenix that he had heard while on retreat in the mountains; of how, as he slept under one of the sacred dryandera trees by a dew-fed pond where the phoenix birds were resting on their journey from the South Sea to the North Sea, he heard the phoenix song, not knowing whether he was awake or dreaming. Immediately he tuned the strings of his lyre to the notes of the bird’s song, and when he returned to the Palace he named this the ‘yellow bell’ pitch, made it the foundation for a series of twelve tones, and ordered that in his Palace night and day without ceasing he would hear music tuned to this ‘yellow bell’ pitch. The nation prospered under his rule as never before or since, with abundant water supply, a dependable crop cycle, and many advances in science, law and government.’
The Director’s voice broke and he fumbled under the lectern for a glass of water. Tian leaned towards me and whispered, ‘Where is this fairy story taking us?’ I shrugged, and someone behind us hissed quietly at us.
The Director flourished a large handkerchief, formed it into a floppy mushroom, wiped his brow and went on. ‘The death of the Yellow Emperor plunged the court into chaos, and the pitch taken from the song of the phoenix was lost. Many years later Confucius himself heard the phoenix song while in the mountains, whereupon he lost his desire to eat for three months, yet did not starve because the perfect music was resonating within his body. That led him to study the marriage between music and mathematics, and thus between music, life and society. He reasoned that, if that lost music of the golden age could be regained it would bring harmony and decorum to human affairs and to nature more quickly than ten thousand words of wise teaching.
‘Year after year the disciples of Confucius would retreat to the mountains in spring, taking with them the finest of stringed instruments, to search for the sacred resting places of the phoenix and to listen for its song. None were successful. Some claimed to have heard the phoenix song and to have tuned their instruments to it, but on the way down the mountain they tripped and dropped their instruments, or encountered a sudden shower of rain, or were ambushed by bandits (or, it has been said, by envious rivals), and the yellow bell pitch was lost once more.’
Tian turned to me once more, his eyes rolled up into his forehead. Professor Yu continued to stare at his feet, seemingly in a trance. By this time the fire had burnt itself out and the column of smoke from the brazier had been reduced to irregular puffs that were sliced and dissipated by the ceiling fans.
‘That was two thousand years ago. There have been thirty-five pitch reforms since the late Zhou period: thirty-five occasions when all the Court musicians of China were required to re-tune their instruments to a new scale in an attempt to bless the nation with peace and prosperity. Was all this effort wasted? Was it merely a folly of Confucianism and feudalism? Was the Yellow Emperor drunk when he hung his qin in the branches of the dryandera tree? Was he dreaming when he heard the sound of the wind vibrating the lowest string, and called that the phoenix song?
‘We now know that the phoenix bird is a fable. But Mao Zedong has said, “Make the past serve the present. Make foreign things serve China.” We have learned from foreigners the scientific method for achieving equal temperament in music. And although China invented the qin at least two thousand years ago, foreigners have introduced us to the piano, the gang-qin, the steel qin. Science has now
given us an industrial instrument, made of the same material as guns and tanks, with a frame made of steel and machine-drawn wires which carry two-hundred pounds of pressure.’
Director Ho at this point produced a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and shook it towards us. ‘Here is the proof! We have made these foreign things serve China. This telegram arrived in my office this morning! Even though the foreigners have had three-hundred years’ head start, we have quickly mastered the steel qin. Yesterday the pianist Fu Cong, a graduate of this conservatory, was awarded third prize in the Chopin Competition in Vienna, the first Chinese musician to be honoured in an international competition.’
There was a moment of silence. ‘Long live Fu Cong!’ the Director shouted, and he shook the telegram in front of us again and it rattled loudly like a snare drum. ‘Fu Cong is a true patriot!’ he shouted, and immediately the room exploded into applause. First one, then another, then a dozen students sprang to their feet, stabbing the air with their fists. ‘Long live Fu Cong!’ we chanted, leaping to our feet and then standing on our chairs. ‘Fu Cong is a true patriot!’
The Director folded the telegram and waved us down. ‘Of course, some of the credit must also go to the Soviet Union, where Fu Cong studied at the Moscow Conservatory.’ More applause, and cries of ‘Long live the Soviet Union!’, and Director Ho approached the Russian advisors and pulled them to their feet and shook hands vigorously with each of them, as if desperately trying a series of locked doors to find one which was open. From the back of the room a photographer strode forward with a camera and a large shining reflector-dish. A magnesium flash momentarily fixed the Director and Nikolai Golden, clearly fearful of having his arm dislocated by the Director’s aggressive pumping, in an impossible, god-like whiteness.
Director Ho resumed the podium and raised his clasped hands in victory. Another flash popped. ‘I declare the Campaign against Debussy a complete success. Normal classes will resume tomorrow. And now I will now present a big character poster written in my own hand.’ He nodded to someone behind us, and two women brought forward a large framed sheet of paper on which was written in bold strokes, ‘Mao Zedong thought is a glittering light. Mao Zedong thought is the phoenix song’. As we continued to applaud, like a rolling series of rainbursts, the poster was hung on the wall beside the portraits of Mao himself and Zhou Enlai and Lenin, where it remained for the rest of my years at the Conservatory.
The Phoenix Song Page 19