The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  The competition had by this time concluded, and the judges quietly passed notes amongst themselves and whispered to each other behind their hands before Maxim Shostakovich approached the microphone and, in what appeared to be passable French, announced the winners. I was awarded second prize once more, and my two companions leant clumsily from either side and kissed me firmly and wetly on both cheeks before releasing me to approach the stage, from where I returned richer by a large cone of flowers, a bronze statuette of a treble clef, and an envelope sealed with red wax which I later relinquished to an embassy official and never saw again.

  We took my tutor home to his apartment, which was only a few blocks away, the young man helping his charge to the front door, and greeting the concierge with a kiss before placing the old man’s hand onto her plump shoulder. He returned to the car, slipped behind the wheel and started the engine. ‘Teplyye pozdravleniya!’ he said, smiling and turning towards me as much as his cramped seat would allow.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Your pronunciation is very good.’

  ‘And . . .’ he went on as we pulled away from the curb. ‘Will you ask . . .’

  ‘If you wish,’ I said, clearing my throat: ‘So where did you learn Russian?’

  ‘In the Caucasus, and then I perfected it in Moscow. I was attached to a foreign embassy there for two years.’

  ‘Attached?’

  ‘Not surgically, you’ll understand,’ he beamed at me. ‘I was their first customer on the consular side.’

  ‘The French Embassy? In Moscow?’

  ‘No. The New Zealand Legation – not strictly an embassy. The day after they opened the doors I was detained on the train from Tomsk for not having a passport. I was delivered into their custody and ended up staying there once they discovered I was the only one whose Russian was good enough to get sense out of an electrician or a greengrocer. The place was still full of boxes and crates, you see. The plumbing barely worked, and they were being charged exorbitant prices for food because they didn’t understand the black market. The new ambassador didn’t speak a word of Russian. And to fix it all they’d brought over a chap who’d been studying at Oxford. Nice fellow, wrote a dissertation on Pushkin or Zhukovsky – but no practical use as an interpreter, as you can imagine.’

  ‘So you understood what I was saying to the judge today?’

  ‘To Comrade Maxim Dmitreyevich Shostakovich, the composer’s son? Every word. In fact, I bumped into him in the men’s room and introduced myself, and I’m taking you to meet him right now.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘at the Louvre. Have you been? Has your friend let you out of his sight?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No to which question?’

  ‘To both. Why does he want to talk to me?’

  ‘I suggest you let him speak for himself.’

  The Louvre was emptying of visitors when we arrived, and my chaperone succeeded in getting us in without paying since it was so late in the day. He strode purposefully up one flight of steps and then slowed his pace and led me through several galleries of paintings before stopping before a large canvas of a battle scene. I watched his eyes scan the painting.

  ‘Is this where he will meet us?’ I said.

  ‘Comrade Maxim? . . . Yes, yes. He said he’d be here.’ He glanced into the adjacent gallery. It, like the one we were in, was empty. ‘At the Blake exhibition.’

  ‘So he wants to speak . . . in confidence?’

  ‘I imagine so. Things aren’t as bad in Russia as they were when the old man was alive; but they’re still . . . well, bad. Maxim is a young man of considerable talent; famous father; the world before him. Can’t afford to take risks, you know.’

  Who can?, I thought, feeling suddenly chilled.

  Loud clacking footsteps approached us from behind. I spun around. A security guard entered the gallery and, seeing us, stopped and started to smooth the worn blue serge of his jacket. He eyed us benevolently and, as if remembering an errand, wandered off.

  When I turned back my companion was gone. ‘Over here,’ he beckoned to me from an adjoining gallery. ‘William Blake,’ he said, as I joined him, pointing to a series of woodcuts arrayed along a wall. ‘I’ve only ever seen these in books. It’s Blake’s Job. Do you know about Job? About Blake? About God? I suspect not.’

  I confirmed to him my ignorance. The naïve figures, the starry monochrome swirls, the winged creatures, the dumb, trance-like agonies, the eyes wide and lidless and blank, reminded me of Chinese folk art, none more so than a picture where Job lies on his bed and over him, smothering him like a lover, hovers a being, half-man half-snake, with hair like the rays of the sun.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘That is God, the Supreme Being, Ruler of the Universe, Almighty, Omnipotent Saviour, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Good Shepherd, Consuming Fire and so on. Do you have gods in China?’

  ‘We do indeed.’ I looked more closely at the woodcut, at the figures beneath Job’s bed, holding chains, reaching their arms up to try to pull him down into the flames which surrounded them.

  ‘Well, you see, this figure here is Job, and he is God’s most loyal servant,’ my companion went on, ‘and yet God has a wager with Satan the Accuser . . . see, this fellow here . . . and he sends all manner of plagues upon Job and has his family killed and his oxen poisoned in order to test his faith. And for forty chapters Job ruminates upon the nature of suffering while scraping his sores with broken pottery, and these chaps here . . . these are Job’s friends who debate with him the question of why suffering occurs and conclude it is probably all Job’s fault. But despite forty chapters of talk nothing is ever settled, and God tires of the whole thing and steps in and restores Job’s riches . . . and leaves him richer and sadder, but no wiser.’

  ‘When did Maxim say he would meet us?’

  ‘Soon, I hope . . . But what Job discovers is that he is in fact morally superior to God; or at least that he is conscious and free in a way that God is unconscious and limited, and indeed amoral, even though he is all-powerful. You must read Jung on the subject, Carl Gustav Jung. He is very good. See how the snake and God are intertwined?’

  I looked again at Job lying on his bed, with the God-Snake stretched out above him and the flame-licked figures beneath the bed clawing at him, and thought immediately of myself and Tian on our bed of reed-mats in the hut on Hainan, with Director Ho’s forbidden scores in their case beneath us. I felt a shiver of remembered disgust.

  ‘And when God finally fronts up to Job,’ my companion went on, ‘all he does is bluster about, saying how powerful he is, and how dare Job challenge him, and who made the monsters of the deep and so on. But the one thing God doesn’t do is reprimand Satan. Why, you might ask? Because Satan is in fact that hidden face of God that God won’t acknowledge. According to Jung, that is.’

  ‘Did you really talk to Maxim?’ I said. ‘Or is this all a hoax?’

  The young man turned down the corners of his mouth, clown-like, but did not look at me.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No to which question?’

  ‘To both,’ he said. ‘I didn’t talk to Maxim; but it’s not a hoax. I wouldn’t call it a hoax. I just didn’t want your time in Paris to end with such a whimper. You can’t leave Paris without seeing the Louvre or the Tuileries or Sacré-Coeur. That wouldn’t be right. Now that would be a hoax – to bring you to Paris and not let you see these things. So I have merely . . . stolen you.’

  ‘Stolen me?’

  ‘Yes. Is it your first time?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I will give you back, I promise,’ he said. ‘I told your Comrade Ruan I would bring you back after the Mayor’s reception.’

  ‘What Mayor’s reception? I don’t recall . . .’

  ‘Exactement,’ he said, taking my arm. ‘So come with me now. We have maybe three hours at the most.’

  We drove though the city as dusk fell and the streetlights spu
ttered into life. I contemplated jumping from the car and trying to make my way to the embassy, but realised that my violin was locked in the car boot, along with my trophy and flowers. Besides, this young man had awakened in me a new curiosity, a nest of new doubts, pecking their way out of their shells. From the corner of my eye I observed his face, illuminated in turn by streetlights, carlights, arc lights and then the glow of the cigarette he had lit. I saw in him a crazily shaped window with patchwork panes of coloured glass through which shone a chaotic, not entirely pleasing light.

  ‘Kak tebya zovut?’ I asked.

  ‘Leon,’ he said, without turning his head. ‘After Trotsky.’

  *

  During my absence in France, Shanghai was becoming drunk on musical glory. As I was preparing to return home a wire came through from Leningrad announcing that Tian Mei Yun had won first prize in the César Cui Piano Competition playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. He was photographed shaking hands with Nikita Khrushchev, and when he arrived in Shanghai two days before I was due to return he celebrated by commandeering a large truck and transporting the Conservatory’s grand piano to Huangpu Park by the river, where he gave an impromptu concert. The news magazines printed photographs: the piano shining like an enormous cockroach, surrounded by a crowd of dock-workers and porters, their mouths open in astonishment; Tian in his coat and tails, hunched intently over the keys playing Chopin and Liszt, and after his performance leaping atop the piano as if it were a tank and waving a red flag as he addressed the crowd. ‘The piano has become a weapon for the proletariat,’ the newspaper quoted him as saying, and he assured me when I asked him that these were his exact words.

  Later that week an audience of factory workers, soldiers and party officials witnessed the first all-Chinese performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Between movements the Party Secretary read out accounts of peasants voluntarily reducing their already meagre rations so rural party secretaries could increase the quota of grain sent to the cities. Loudspeakers on street corners played newly minted songs from the Conservatory, sung by the Conservatory choir and orchestra; songs such as ‘Marxism is one sentence: revolution is justified’, ‘To sail the ocean we depend on the Helmsman; to carry out a revolution we depend upon the Thought of Mao Zedong’, and ‘Mao Zedong Thought Glitters with Golden Light’.

  The papers published a progress report on musical production for the whole country. The number of advanced music schools increased from four to eighteen, and the number of professional music associations from three to one hundred and forty-eight. Two thousand musical titles had been published in sixty million volumes. Thirty-two million records pressed, in 3,500 titles. Ninety-four Chinese accepted for entry into international competitions and seventy music groups touring abroad.

  It was perhaps no surprise when I received a telegram from Professor Yu informing me that I was not to return to Shanghai immediately, but that I would remain in Paris to prepare for another international competition, which, for the time being, was not specified. Ruan and I moved back into the embassy compound and its four walls became, in effect, my prison. Leon would bring my elderly teacher to the embassy gate every morning and the two of us would help him up the stairs to the third-storey room beneath the mansard roof in which we would spend the next two hours practising. Ruan was reassigned to other duties, and I missed my walks with him. I also missed the busy corridors of the Conservatoire and the cacophony from the practice rooms.

  The competition for which I had been kept in Paris turned out to be a small one, in a quiet, damp country town in Belgium which was shrouded in fog for the three days I was there. The other competitors were Flemish and Dutch schoolchildren, talented no doubt, but as I accepted first prize from the competition’s wealthy benefactors and turned to acknowledge the applause of the small audience who had emerged from the foggy streets and half-filled the town hall, an audience comprising for the most part the families of the other competitors, I felt rather like a bully who has taken a liking to a small child’s toy and dispatched its rightful owner with a slap of the hand. I realised that Madame Huang and Director Ho were detaining me in France to keep me safe, far away from China.

  My monkish existence in Paris continued through the winter, and it was not until February 1959 that I was summoned back to Shanghai. Although Madame Huang’s telegram to me said nothing of the sort, I thought I knew what its message was: she had succeeded in getting Kirill back to Shanghai.

  I was met at the airport by Madame Huang, Ding Shangde, a girl carrying another medal of honour, and a photographer to record the occasion. I was soon installed in the back of a car with Madame Huang, and without a word she handed me a telegram dated a week before, placed a hand on my knee and turned her face to look out at the street scene passing by. It was from my mother informing me that my father had died. ‘I am sorry that it turned out like this,’ Madame Huang whispered to me. ‘I had hoped it would turn out better.’

  My father’s final illness had been sudden, my mother wrote in the letter that arrived a week later. He had been immobile for some time and had developed pneumonia and bedsores that became infected. He had put up little resistance. I should be assured that his last thoughts were for me and for my future career, my mother wrote, and that this had made his suffering bearable. She promised to send money the following summer, so that I could visit during my holidays.

  I sat in my room for three days and cried and slept. Ling Ling brought me tea, which I drank, and food, which I did not eat. Tian visited me and tried to talk to me for half an hour, and then gave up, leaving a small bunch of flowers. Comrade Meretrenko wrote me a kind note – in faltering Chinese characters (with a Russian translation) – and slipped it under my door. Strangely, it was Madame Huang who provided the most comfort. She bustled into the room and embraced me for what seemed like an hour, stroking my hair as if I was a child, and telling me about the deaths of her own parents and of the daughter she had lost to malaria. ‘It is important to be alone,’ she said, as she rose to leave. ‘In China there are so few opportunities to be alone. We are always out serving the masses. In times to come you will look back on these days and be thankful.’

  Every day I reopened my mother’s letter and read it again, fresh tears tap-tapping onto the paper, blurring the words but not washing them away. When we met, some months later, she explained that she knew her letters were being read by the Party authorities, and did not want to jeopardise my position by reminding them of my past links to Rightist elements. She also apologised for lying to me about the circumstances of my father’s death. She explained that they had both been detained as Rightists in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers Movement. They had not taken any part in the Movement itself, she said; but the backlash that followed it gave a pretext for anyone who was out of favour to be arrested. My mother had been sent to a re-education camp in the countryside for four months, during which she heard nothing about my father’s whereabouts or well-being, although she was permitted to send and receive letters from me.

  Her release, and my father’s, had coincided with my prize from Bucharest. My father had been in Xiangfeng Prison again, and this time shared a cell with Li Changching, with whom he had worked to restore order to Harbin after the defeat of the Japanese. His health had further deteriorated in prison, although Li had nursed him as best he could. When he was released my father could no longer walk, was occasionally incontinent and suffered from poor circulation in his legs. Mercifully, they were allowed to move back into their house. She had not lied about Zhu Shaozen and his nephew, however. And, unannounced, a doctor had arrived from Beijing to tend to my father, bringing drugs and an oxygen tent and other medical equipment. She recognised him as a fellow student from her medical training days in Beijing years before. He was a jovial fellow, for whom suffering and death were part of the universal comedy that also encompassed birth and food and play and the taking of modest pleasures. The doctor, my mother and Zhu were my father’s companions during his final weeks,
feeding and washing him, talking to him and noting without celebration his small responses, carrying him to and from a cot they had placed by the fish pond, cooling his brow with water, playing records and conversing with him as if he were fully present. Around and around they went, my mother told me, like children in a game, until the night fell.

  11. The Liberation of Mudanjiang

  One morning a week after I received news of my father’s death I was woken by Madame Huang’s hand on my shoulder. ‘The Conservatory has a guest house in a fishing village on the coast,’ Madame Huang said. ‘I have arranged for you and your mother to use it for three days.’ She handed me a telegram that read: ‘Arrive Shanghai Monday.’

  My mother had barely slept throughout the three-day train journey, and as she stepped down from the railway carriage she wilted onto my shoulder like a flower. ‘Welcome to Shanghai,’ I said, taking her suitcase. She smiled and said a few words in greeting, and I saw that her tiredness was not simply that of the journey. We emerged through the station doors into a greasy envelope of spring heat. Our cotton clothing plastered itself to our limbs as we waited to catch the bus to the small seaside town where the Conservatory had its guest house.

  The house was one of several that were built amidst a copse of trees on the edge of a cliff. All were owned by large work units in the city – the ball bearing factory; the municipal power corporation; the Academy of Social Sciences – and were for use by senior cadres. The old couple who were employed as caretakers showed us to our room, a simple space with two cots under mosquito nets, a small chest of drawers, two chairs and a table, all painted white, and a washstand with an old porcelain water pitcher and a chipped white basin. A door led out onto the veranda from which there were views down to the fishing village below, and beyond it the sandy beach and the blue-grey mass of the sea, gently pitching and rolling at high tide. A steep staircase built into the rock gave access from the guest houses to the village and the beach.