The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  He led me down to the waterfront past racks of drying fish, to a jetty where we boarded a flat-bottomed fishing boat. An old man sat at the helm beneath a flapping cloth awning, and once we were settled on the boards above the fish-hold he pushed the boat away from the dock with a pole and pulled the rip-cord on an outboard motor several times until it fired. Within minutes we had left the harbour behind and were skimming around the coast beyond the reef line.

  Tian sat in the bow with the case by his feet. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

  ‘I am forbidden to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the point of being secretive? I will find out very soon. Unless you plan to blindfold me.’

  ‘We are going to a village along the coast. You can only get there by sea.’

  ‘And why are you taking me?’ I asked.

  He refused to answer, and turned his face upwards to catch the breeze.

  ‘Why are you taking me?’

  He continued to ignore me. I pulled my hat firmly over my eyes to protect myself from the dazzle of the sunlight on the water, and settled into a drowse. After almost an hour the boatman throttled back the engine, manoeuvred past some rocks and tied up at the jetty of a small village whose dozen or so houses were built on stilts over the waters of a lagoon. The boatman helped us from the boat and led us along a rickety boardwalk, around drying nets and fish traps, patting local children affectionately on the shoulder, until he stopped at one of the houses, and rapped on its doorpost to announce our arrival. He introduced the village chief, and we were welcomed warmly and urged to sit and share a meal of fish and rice. This we ate in silence, and then our boatman spoke to the village chief in the local dialect and bade us farewell with smiles and bows and handshakes, assuring Tian he would return to collect us before nightfall.

  The chief led us onshore and for half an hour we trailed behind his grass-sided shoes along a narrow path that wound through a mangrove swamp and up the side of a small bluff before descending into an adjacent bay. He took us to a solitary hut by the shore and pointed to a small adjacent jetty, speaking to Tian in his dialect.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ I asked.

  ‘I think he’s saying that this is where our boatman will pick us up,’ he answered. ‘I hope that’s what he meant.’

  The chief beckoned us inside the hut. It was unfurnished and damp and smelled of rotting vegetation. The chief pulled back several of the fibrous mats that covered the wooden floor and then squatted down and showed us a trapdoor set into the floor. This he lifted and together we peered into a small cavity, around half a metre square and the same depth. I sat down on a mat for a rest.

  Tian sniffed the air and ran his hand around the inside lip of the cavity. ‘Too damp,’ he said. ‘Things will rot in here. I asked for somewhere dry.’

  The chief shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms outwards in a gesture of misapprehension or indifference.

  ‘Do you have nothing else? Nothing drier?’ Tian said. The man shrugged again. ‘Do you even speak Mandarin?’ Tian asked, and looked to me appealingly.

  ‘I thought I was just here for the ride,’ I said, and Tian turned down his lower lip in a clownish gesture, so I huffed loudly, got to my feet and addressed myself to the chief: ‘Vy govorite po-russki?’ The chief contracted his brows and gave a tilt of the head. ‘Well, I tried my best,’ I said to Tian. ‘He doesn’t speak Russian either.’

  The chief turned and stood in the doorway in the mottled shade of the palm trees. He pointed towards the south, where the sun was now beating down on the surface of the bay. ‘About a day’s journey under sail,’ he said, in perfectly adequate Mandarin, ‘there is a small island where my uncle would spend the summer. There is an old mine on the island – nickel, I think. There are some concrete buildings there. It is away from the sea, very dry.’

  Tian sighed. ‘That’s too far,’ he said. ‘We only have today. Is there nothing in your village?’

  ‘Anything dry in our village?’ the man laughed. ‘We live on stilts over a swamp – or did you not notice that?’

  ‘This will have to do then,’ Tian huffed. ‘Thank you, you may leave us.’

  The chief remained motionless, until Tian, remembering himself, reached into his pocket and withdrew a small roll of bank notes. ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said, pressing them into the chief’s palm. ‘And for your silence.’

  The chief nodded and withdrew.

  As we secured the trapdoor and arranged the reed mats on top of it Tian explained to me that the scores were not safe in Shanghai, and that he had promised Director Ho that he would conceal them in Hainan as soon as possible after we arrived, but that circumstances had intervened, and they were needed for our work here. This was our last opportunity to fulfil the Director’s original instructions.

  ‘Why did you need to bring me?’ I repeated.

  ‘I needed a second witness,’ Tian said. ‘In case anything happens to me, you will know where to come. I was going to bring Ling Ling, but I’m not sure I can trust her.’

  ‘Her loyalty?’

  ‘Her sense of direction.’

  ‘Who else knows about this?’

  ‘Only the Director,’ Tian said. ‘It is our little secret, yes?’

  We sat on the jetty for several hours waiting for our boatman to arrive. The sun dipped towards the horizon. I suggested that we return to the village, as the boatman may have forgotten where he was to meet us; but Tian would have none of it. ‘As soon as we do that, he will appear here, and then we will be lost,’ he said. We did retrace our steps to the foot of the bluff, however, and he pointed out a tree he had spotted on our way in which was laden with red green globes. ‘I think it’s a kind of mango,’ he said, and he hoisted me up onto a low branch from where I plucked several of the fleshy fruit and threw them down to him. They were under-ripe, but edible, and we returned to the jetty with twenty or so wrapped up in Tian’s shirt, and consumed half of them as a cool wind sprang up off the sea, the waves sank into a dark grey shimmer and a half-moon emerged from over the bluff.

  As the sun set we retreated to the hut, lay on the grass mats and talked quietly in the darkness. A family of small bats assembled under the eaves, firing angry glances at us from amidst their leathery folds. Tian told me about growing up amidst privilege in Suzhou and Shanghai, about his family’s servants, and their holidays in California, and about the years he had spent during the Civil War with his sister and mother at his uncle’s large French Provincial house in the outskirts of Hanoi. He told me how no matter where the family was they always carried his cello and arranged for a piano to be available for him, and in Hanoi even found him a tutor, a white-suited French paterfamilias who was married, it appeared, to two Vietnamese sisters. Tian asked me about my childhood, and I was only a few minutes into my story when I noticed his breathing soften and become regular. I continued speaking softly for a few minutes, finding that I was myself interested in listening to the sound of my own voice giving an account of my childhood, and stopping only when I started to explain my father’s illness and realised how much I missed listening to him talk about how his latest symptoms had unmasked further curiosities of his body and his mind.

  The sea breeze held up for several hours and then died away. I drifted in and out of sleep, unable to find comfort in the humid, salty air, lacking a pillow and in my dozing mind transfiguring the noises of the forest around us into a convocation of snakes and insects and rodents drawn to our hut by the scent of warm bodies. I told myself I would not be harmed if I lay perfectly still.

  As the sky brightened towards dawn I half awoke and found Tian beside me, very close, leaning on his elbow and stroking my face with his right hand. His breath was warm on my face and he began kissing me – on the cheekbone, on the tip of my nose, and on my chin. I reached up my right hand and awkwardly held the back of his head. I grasped his skull through his wiry hair and pulled his face closer, so that his kisses were harder, so that they pressed throu
gh my skin and onto the muscle and tissue beneath. I pulled his head down towards my neck and my shoulders and my collarbone, and pressed it down again, further, onto the mound of my breast. We were tugging at our clothing, and then I felt the spidery warmth of his fingers moving down over my stomach, and soon I was holding him over me, grasping his narrow hips, welcoming him, claiming him. I closed my eyes and felt the movement of his bones, hard beneath his soft flesh, and suddenly I felt that I was holding some creature that was not Tian, or was only partly him, like the coiled snakes of happiness and grief, for he was letting out a sound like sobbing from somewhere deep within his chest. And then there was only wetness, mine and his. And he was saying, over and over, ‘Dui bu qi, dui bu qi, dui bu qi. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Then he succumbed to the stillness of our hut, and I became suddenly aware of the harsh scent of our sweat and the damp gushing of the sea at our feet and nothing more.

  For several minutes Tian’s body hung over me, the heels of his hands pressing into the mat either side of my head, his torso sagging downwards, drips of sweat falling from his ribcage onto my stomach, and his head lolling from side to side so that his moist hair brushed my temple and his breath caressed my sternum with prickly gusts of heat. I thought suddenly of the scores in the case beneath us and of the need to protect their delicate dryness from this wet that would dampen and rot away the staves and the notes. So I rolled Tian onto his back beside me and he watched as I gathered my clothes. I walked down to the sea and edged my way forward into the gentle morning waves, clutching my arms across my chest, my toes testing each boulder on the seafloor as I progressed.

  After I had immersed myself several times I picked my way back to the shore and sat on a large rock, naked, drawing my knees up under my chin and watching the sun rise out of the sea. Tian walked past me without speaking and made his fumbling way into the water. Rather than watch him wash, I dressed and returned to the hut. I pulled back the floor mats and opened the trapdoor. Director Ho’s case sat snugly in the cavity. I closed the trapdoor and covered it with mats once more.

  I heard Tian’s voice calling out and, moving to the doorway of the hut, saw him dancing around on one foot as he tugged on a trouser leg, and then clutching his belt ends with one hand as he waved the other arm above his head. In the distance I saw that the little blue fishing boat had come around the point and was making its way through a gap in the breakers about half a kilometre offshore. Tian waved again after he had buttoned his shirt, and watched as the boatman approached our tumbledown jetty, gunned the engine for the last time and threw a rope around the largest upright. He beckoned to us, and I went to the back of the hut to gather up the remainder of our fruit from the night before. I found them covered with insects crawling happily amongst their gelatinous pulp, and left them where they were.

  When I reached the shore, Tian was ahead of me, picking his way carefully along the uneven boards of the jetty. I followed him, steadying myself on the rotting posts, and soon we were in the boat and heading back out through the passage into the open sea. Tian sat in the bow of the boat, humming to himself and turning from time to time to give me a mischievous smile. I sat at the stern beside the boatman. He asked how we had passed the night. He seemed happy with my curt reply and left me to my own thoughts for the duration of the journey.

  As Tian and I walked together through the fish market to the barracks where we were billeted, he whispered to me, ‘You will keep our secret, won’t you?’

  ‘What secret is that?’ I said. ‘About Director Ho’s scores, you mean?’

  ‘Yes . . . and also about what happened,’ Tian said.

  ‘What did happen?’ I asked. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s a secret.’ We walked on through the throng of townsfolk going about their morning business, and as we approached our lodgings he said, ‘What I mean is: you won’t tell Ling Ling. Will you?’

  ‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘As long as the two of us know where the case is hidden, there is no need to tell anyone else. That was your plan, wasn’t it? As you yourself said, these are things she cannot be trusted with.’ I turned away from him and quickened my pace so that I reached the barracks several minutes before him.

  *

  Two days later we returned to the mainland and boarded the train to Shanghai. At the Conservatory little appeared to have changed. Classes continued as normal and Ho Luting remained the Director, although it was rumoured that only intervention from high up in the Party had saved him. Nevertheless, he was rarely seen around the Conservatory, and his duties were for the most part performed by Yu Huiyong, who now had the title of Adjunct Deputy Director of the Conservatory, in which capacity he led daily one-hour political instruction sessions.

  ‘Western music is bound up in a system of social snobbery,’ Yu explained at the first of these sessions I attended. ‘Not only do Chinese listeners not understand it, but the working people of the West do not understand it, and a great many bourgeoisie only pretend to understand to show how civilised they are. So-called abstract music – music in which each section is simply identified by a technical description and a number (Symphony No. 4, Adagio in G, and so on) – is inseparably associated with the establishment of capitalist production relations and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Untitled music is the means by which bourgeois composers conceal the class content of their works.’

  Yu’s ideas severely threatened the teaching repertoire. What music could be taught in the Conservatory? the faculty asked, and in response Yu posted on the main door a list of music that passed the ideological tests: the Yellow River Concerto, the Shajiabang Symphony, the opera A Storm on the Yangtze, and a long list of choral works and songs: The Red Lantern, Ambushed from All Sides, Chairman Mao Arrives at Tiananmen, Transfer to the Front-Lines after Graduation and Going up to Peach Peak Three Times. There was immediate chaos. Were these the only pieces of music that could be taught or performed? Was the whole Western corpus to be discarded as bourgeois? What about Soviet or Eastern European music? And what of classical Chinese music? Of Three Variations on a Plum Blossom? Or Chinese folk music? Was the music composed after the Revolution of 1911 acceptable? Or was everything composed before the Communist victory of 1949 to be condemned as feudal as well? And what exactly were the principles that should be applied to distinguish socialist music from bourgeois music?

  Some students made a bonfire of suspect sheet music on the front steps of the Conservatory, and refused to play anything that was not on Yu’s list. A few members of the faculty, in mock zealotry, queried some of the items on Yu’s list for having reactionary or revisionist tendencies. The Soviet advisors withdrew into an angry silence.

  Director Ho remained silent throughout, having let it be known that he was busy composing an oratorio based on the Long March of 1934. Yu was forced to post revised lists on his door and entertain earnest delegations of students seeking clarification. Glinka and Haydn and Beethoven were rehabilitated, followed shortly after by Mozart and Chopin and (it was rumoured), at the playful instigation of the Soviet advisors, by their obscure compatriots Viktor Kosenko, Serafim Tulikov and Modest Tabachnikov. Rumour and counter-rumour circulated. Brahms and Strauss were sanctioned one morning, but banned again by evening. Schubert and Rimsky-Korsakov suffered the same fate on another day. Borodin came and went within the space of a few hours. The stock of each composer rose and fell at the prompting of an invisible hand, and outside the practice rooms in the evening we would listen nervously to what was being played within, lest anyone lapse into some reactionary arpeggios or bourgeois atonality.

  One morning we found that all the lists on the main door had been torn down and replaced by a single-page manifesto entitled ‘Four Principles towards a Socialist Theory of Music’. Professor Yu did not claim to be the author of the principles, although it was written in his own hand, but he later hinted that they had originated from a source high up in the Party. We were summoned to the refectory to hear him read them out a
nd urge us to apply them to our work without any more bickering:

  1. China’s musicians must find a course independent of both Western bourgeois standards and native feudalism. The foreign tiger and the native tiger are both ferocious, and we must not be bound to them.

  2. Western music is politically unhealthy. Madame Butterfly describes the shaming of Japanese women by American imperialism; and La Traviata dignifies prostitution. Capitalism’s music is headed for destruction, and you do not want to die along with it.

  3. However, Chinese folk songs are not a satisfactory basis for creating a new musical culture. When the Ministry of Culture encouraged folk songs, no one sang revolutionary songs any more.

  4. International musical competitions are capitalist at the core. Nevertheless, China does receive some benefit from the standpoint of international relations. China should establish an international festival of Asian, African and Latin American music, and then withdraw from Western competitions.

  The principles were, I thought, from first to last extremely unhelpful; but to my amazement Yu’s announcement fostered a kind of bemused euphoria. Faculty members resumed teaching Western music. ‘First, master Mozart and Beethoven,’ they said, ‘and then surpass it. And as regards China’s international standing, once we have carried home every trophy from the West, we will establish our own competitions.’ Within days of Yu’s announcement Beethoven and Brahms were again heard throughout the halls of the Conservatory, and as they entered the building each morning many students glanced ruefully at the scorch-marks left on the front steps by the bonfire of precious scores.

  In the Foreign Teachers’ Building the new plumbing system appeared to work no better than the old one had. There was dust everywhere, and for a few days we had to step over a pile of perfectly serviceable lead pipes that lay athwart the entrance way awaiting removal. Madame Huang took me to the roof of the building that backed onto mine, and showed me the small removable panel that had been installed by the fire escape on the third floor. She explained that a small cavity had been created in the internal wall of Raya and Pavel’s apartment so that I would be able to climb down the fire escape, remove the panel, and crawl into the wall cavity to position myself at more or less the exact centre of the apartment: the bedroom would be to my right; the living room would be in front of me; and the bathroom, should I care to listen, would be to my left. The space had been equipped with a small shaded light to help me write down my notes.