The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  8. Flowers

  In May of 1957, the Shanghai Liberation Daily – like every other newspaper in China – published Mao Zedong’s essay ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’. When I arrived at the Conservatory that morning it was pinned to the front door for all to read. Diversity of thought was a constructive thing, Mao wrote, and now that China had successfully emerged as a socialist nation in the years since the Civil War such diversity could be encouraged. The essay contained the sentence that was to be on everyone’s lips for the next two months, and then locked away inside the deepest cavern of our thoughts for the next decade:

  Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.

  At the time I was taken up with watching two particular flowers bloom. First, I had been invited to join the second violins in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for their upcoming all-Chinese performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The practice rooms were down by the river, in a large warehouse upstairs from a fish market. Rehearsals began in late May, and coincided with the arrival of the huang-mei, a month of rain named after the yellow plum that ripens at that time of year. The rain itself, which came daily in gushing downpours, brought a temporary respite from the humidity and the heat. During that month, green mould formed on stored clothes, and we made jokes about our bed sheets yielding a crop of fresh mushrooms every morning. At night in the orchestra practice rooms, the smell of the day’s commerce of fish gained in strength, until rehearsals were like a two-hour bath in a bowl of stale fish soup. I got Ling Ling to leave me a bucket of warm water in the hallway, so that I could wash the smell off my skin when I returned home.

  The other flower bloomed in mid-June. Pavel Gachev had returned to Russia for the summer, and Raya Vishinsky was to stay on for a couple of weeks to finish some research before joining him. The night after Pavel left Kirill visited again, bringing a bottle of vodka and talking quietly with Raya for an hour before leaving in his car. It was the first occasion he had visited in Pavel’s absence. This time they kept the door closed in spite of the humidity, and so I stood in the dark with my ear pressed to the keyhole, picking up the occasional phrase but nothing more.

  The following night Kirill arrived again, this time carrying a large bag in his arms. Raya closed the door again, but after a couple of minutes opened it and waved a cloud of cigarette smoke into the corridor. I shrank into a corner as she stood in the doorway for a moment and took a long pull on her cigarette, turning it in her fingers and studying it while she breathed out through her nose and mouth simultaneously. She returned to her guest, but left the door ajar. I positioned myself by the door, amidst the slowly sinking drifts of hazy blue. Kirill was explaining that he had to go away the following week on consulate business. ‘To Beijing?’ Raya asked.

  ‘No,’ Kirill replied. ‘To Moscow first. Marshall Peng De Huai the Defence Minister will be there for talks with Khrushchev. So I must be there also. And then afterwards I go to Paris and London and Washington.’

  ‘Washington? Why Washington?’

  ‘Some senior members of the Central Committee wish to go on a journey. It is my job to check out the accommodation and to ensure they receive a warm welcome.’

  ‘So you are a travel agent, Kirill? Another string to your bow.’

  ‘This is very special travel. Many, many people must independently cover great distances, and arrive simultaneously at new destinations.’

  ‘Perhaps I should not have asked the question, and perhaps I would not understand the answer even if you told me.’

  There was the clink of bottle on glass.

  At that moment I heard the rustle of feet on the stairs above me, and the sound of several voices, including Comrade Meretrenko’s. I sprang to my feet. With the light from the open door there was nowhere for me to hide. I took a few steps forward, heading down to the next floor, but then heard more voices and footsteps approaching from below. I was caught, and in my panic I slipped through the open door into the vestibule of Raya’s apartment, hoping to hide there until the ascending and descending parties had crossed. Beyond the thin curtain, Raya and her guest continued to talk; but when they heard the commotion as Comrade Meretrenko greeted his neighbours in the corridor, Raya said, ‘I should close that door now,’ and came towards me. I quickly stepped in the coat cupboard, whose entrance was covered by another thin curtain, and found myself awkwardly positioned amidst padded winter jackets, women’s knee-length boots, a broom and a floor mop. Raya closed the apartment door, and the chain-lock rattled into place.

  For several minutes I stood perfectly still, waiting for the thumping in my chest to subside and for my breathing to return to normal. Raya and her guest were talking quietly about Raya’s plans to visit her mother in Leningrad the following month. Then they were silent for a long time, so long in fact that I began to wonder if they had fallen into a drunken sleep. Then I heard the man’s voice again. ‘I have brought you a new record. Viktor brought it back from Paris for me.’

  ‘A corrupting French composer?’ Raya asked.

  ‘What else?’ Kirill said. ‘It is Maurice Ravel. Let me play you my favourite piece. It is a kind of gypsy tune called Tzigane. Perhaps you know it.’

  After a moment the music began: a dramatic solo piece on the violin, full of double-stopping, a difficult technique in which two notes are played simultaneously on separate strings. The music brought to my mind a Uighur dance I had once seen in Harbin, when a caravan of traders came to the edge of the city to sell pelts and knives and roots of ginseng (which, my mother pointed out to me, bore a striking resemblance to boiled children). The dancers – two men, one young, the other old – were tied together at the wrists, as if engaged in a ritual fight to the death, and flung each other around a circular earthen pit. Here too, in this music, there were bursts of energy followed by vertiginous pauses on single notes; and then the melody and the harmony, and with them my imaginary dancers, would swoop once again, twisting and turning around their locked wrists, centrifuge and pivot, planet and moon, matching limb to limb, muscle to muscle, flank to flank, face to face. It was like nothing I had heard before.

  The piece lasted a good ten minutes, and when it finished there was silence once more, except for the repeated clicking of the stylus as the record spun beneath it. I waited for someone to raise the arm of the record player and for the clicking to end, but it did not. After several minutes I stole a glance from my hiding place into the vestibule, and then, hearing nothing at all from Raya and her guest, I tiptoed across the floor and put my face to the curtain, trying to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. I could see only a sliver of the scene between the two halves of the curtain. I saw a portion of Kirill’s bare shoulder, peppered with black hairs, and the back of his head; and lodged in the crook of his neck I saw the sole of Raya’s foot, still clothed in a dark stocking, but with a large hole at the heel. Behind her heel I saw Raya’s face. She was supporting herself on her elbows, her lips oddly pursed, her eyes flicking up and down, her brows flinching as if she were receiving treatment from some rough doctor. She tried without success to blow away a strand of hair that had fallen across her face, and then smiled and mouthed ‘spasiba’ as Kirill’s hand brushed it back. Then she brought her arms forward and hoisted herself towards Kirill and her face appeared by his elbow, her eyes clenched tightly shut for a moment before they opened in a wide blank stare. I turned aside quickly for fear she would see me, and all I heard from then on was the sound of their breathing, gasps of laughter or surprise or disappointment, audible beneath the gentle clicking from the record player.

  I retreated to the coat cupboard. My heart was beating fast and my temples hurt. The music was playing again in my head, and although I tried to I could not halt its progress. And this time I saw in my mind’s eye, not the beautiful dance I had imagined previously, but the clasping of bodies, the clammy smell of warm breath, and the release of folds of flesh from sweat-moistened clothing.

  After a whil
e the apartment fell silent. I contemplated letting myself out, but realised that it would involve releasing the chain-lock. Even if the noise did not disturb the lovers within, the unattached chain might alert Raya to the fact that someone else had been in the apartment with them. I decided I would have to take my chances in the morning, and tried to make myself comfortable and to formulate what I would say in the event that I was discovered. An hour passed, and I was drifting in and out of sleep when I heard a noise next to me. Someone was standing outside the door of the apartment, and whoever it was began to knock on the door, gently at first and then more loudly. It must have been the driver from the consulate, impatient to retrieve his charge and return home to his bed. Within minutes I heard Kirill unhook the chain and let himself out, leaving the chain swinging free. I seized the moment and slipped from my hiding place into the vestibule and then out into the stairwell.

  Back in my room I found my own bed, and as I lay waiting for sleep I heard the distant bells of the old Custom House, playing ‘The East is Red’ followed by two long tones.

  *

  Madame Huang carefully noted down the events of the previous night. I explained how I had ended up inside the apartment, and what Raya and her friend Kirill had said. ‘Her foot was where?’ Madame Huang asked, and as she wrote she tried several times to banish the smile that crept like a kitten across her face. She was most pleased with the revelation that Kirill was going to London and Washington. ‘Now this is very important, and we need to know more. But it poses a problem for us,’ she said. ‘We cannot rely upon the door being left open.’ Madame Huang pondered the question for a while, tapping her chin with end of a pencil. ‘When did Comrade Vishinsky say she was leaving for the Soviet Union?’ she asked. I told her I thought it was within the next couple of weeks. ‘Good,’ she said, and dismissed me.

  In the weeks that followed, the Hundred Flowers Movement gathered momentum. There were protests against the Party and its elitism. ‘Party members enjoy many privileges which make them a race apart,’ complained one opinion piece in the Shanghai Liberation Daily. There were reports of the establishment of a Democracy Wall at Beijing University, covered with posters critical of the Party. Art and culture was suddenly in vogue. The papers published poetry by poets whose voices had not been heard for years. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra was given new quarters, and we found ourselves rehearsing in the reception hall of a former embassy on Bubbling Well Road in the old International Settlement.

  Meanwhile Director Ho published an article praising the prize-winning pianist Fu Cong, and the inspiration he had received from his father, Fu Lei, the translator of bourgeois French novels, who had received no mention in the initial enthusiasm over Fu Cong’s success. Ho expressed regret that China had not passed through a capitalist phase, since he believed that would have inspired a more adventurous musical culture and produced many more performers like Fu Cong, not to mention works by Chinese composers that could have ranked alongside Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He urged Chinese parents to encourage any signs of musical talent in their children, and to hold out to them the prospect of competing in international competitions, and winning accolades for their country.

  Things also improved in the Foreign Teachers’ Building. It was announced that the plumbing system would be completely modernised, and that work on the project would begin immediately. Although they had not complained about the plumbing system in the building, the Russian advisors were happy to go along with the idea. Asked why the haste, it was made clear that funds had been freed up from elsewhere and workmen were available. Besides, several of the Russian advisors were returning to visit their families during the summer, so June and July would be the least disruptive time to do the work. Raya Vishinsky brought forward her travel plans, packed her suitcase and was gone within days.

  *

  In September 1957 I received another letter from my mother. The Hundred Flowers were blooming in Harbin too, she wrote, and in the food stalls by the riverbank people met to talk late into the night about their hopes and their frustrations. Everywhere there is argument, she wrote. In the streets, the markets, in factories, in the alleyways, in the hospital. It is as if life is our adversary, and every step forward must be won by belligerence and contention. Kasimir and Piroshka had returned to Moscow, she added, matter-of-factly, to look after their son. And my father’s health was not good, she went on. He had stopped riding his bicycle after several bad falls, one of which had led to a broken finger. But he continued to go to work most days, she assured me, and, she added, I should not even think of returning home. She and my father had discussed the possibility and agreed I should wait until the end of my studies.

  I sat on my bed reading the letter over and over until I knew every stroke of every character that had flowed from my mother’s pen, and as I read they released into my mind a flood of tiny, half-formed thoughts, like unresolved chords. That was where Ling Ling found me some time afterwards, sitting motionless with the letter in my lap. ‘Where were you?’ she said. ‘We had a booking for a practice room, but you never turned up, so we lost it. Tian is mad with you.’ When I didn’t respond she sat down beside me on the bed quietly, and, placing her chin on my shoulder, began to read the letter. ‘Bad news?’ she asked.

  ‘My father is sick,’ I said. ‘My mother is protecting me from the truth. She won’t tell me how sick he is.’

  ‘Then you must go to him,’ she said, ‘despite what your mother says.’ And she sprang to her feet, and then crouched down beside me and pulled her suitcase from beneath the bed. She opened it, thrust her hand amongst her clothes and produced a small cloth pouch. From this she took a roll of bank notes and peeled off several. ‘Here,’ she said, folding the notes and pressing them into my palm. ‘You’ll need this to pay for your ticket. We can go the station right away and buy it.’

  I looked up at her without speaking, and in response she closed my fingers over the money and squeezed my hand shut. ‘But of course you’ll need permission from the Director,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to his office first.’ And with that she pulled me to my feet, threaded her arm through mine, and guided me downstairs to the street and around the corner to the Conservatory.

  We sat in Director Ho’s office waiting for him to appear, while his secretary roamed about rustling papers and sighing at us. After an hour Director Ho bustled in, trailing a line a smoke from the freshly-lit cigarette in his hand. He made for his desk, and then stopped short when he saw us perched on the edge of his low sofa. The secretary appeared at his side. ‘I’ll tell them to come back later,’ he said to Director Ho.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Director Ho said. ‘We all have work to do. Better to deal with things when we can.’ He sat down opposite us and drew on his cigarette, sucking as much out of it as he could before stamping it into an ashtray on the table between us. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘tell me your business.’

  I found my voice and began to explain the letter from my mother, the news of my father’s illness, the reasons why I should ignore their plea that I remain in Shanghai. Ho listened intently, muttering short affirmations at the end of each of my statements and from time to time rubbing his cheeks and eyebrows with his fingers, as if trying to wipe something from his skin.

  ‘Show me the letter,’ he said. I gave it to him and watched the top of his head as he smoothed out the pages on his knee and read it. ‘You are right,’ he said as he folded the letter and returned it to me. ‘You must go to see your father. His condition appears serious.’ He leaned back in his chair, and turned his face towards the window and the trees in the courtyard shedding their blossom. Ling Ling squeezed my hand tight. Without turning back to me, Director Ho went on, ‘But first there is something you must do – a small detour, you might say.’

  He paused. ‘A detour?’ I said.

  He turned back to face me. ‘I want you to pack your things and be ready to leave immediately. It may be tonight or tomorrow morning,’ he said.

  ‘Leave for Harb
in?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘For Moscow or Bucharest. As of yet I can’t tell you which one. In both cities there is an international competition. Our friend Comrade Meretrenko tells me your playing is of a very high standard, and that you are ready for such things.’

  I began to protest my unworthiness, but Director Ho rose to his feet and summoned his secretary. ‘I have no time for shows of false modesty,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘You would not be at this Conservatory if you did not have talent. Now leave me. I have to find seats on an aeroplane going west.’ He ushered us from his office and shut the door behind us.

  Before dawn the next morning I was woken by Madame Huang and bundled into a military car purring quietly at the entrance to our building. She handed me a small booklet. It was a passport, with a photograph of me that had been taken when I first arrived at the Conservatory at the age of thirteen. ‘You are flying to Bucharest this morning with Director Ho and Tian Mei Yun,’ she told me. ‘There is an international competition. We have instructions to send our best performers. There was a military plane available, and we could not pass up the opportunity.’

  She sat beside me as we drove through the quiet streets towards the outskirts of the city. ‘There is something else you should know,’ she said after a while. ‘Our great pianist, Fu Cong, has defected to the West.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘It is said he has fallen in love with the daughter of Yehudi Menuhin,’ she replied. ‘No doubt he has also fallen in love with the life of ease his father enjoyed, and fallen out of love with China and its people.’