The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  It was the first time my mother had seen the sea. I myself had only seen the Black Sea from the window of an aeroplane. We stood side by side for several minutes on the cliff top watching its marbled surface, our capacity to think or speak muted by its immensity. I had never imagined that anything could be bigger than China; but from the viewpoint of those cliffs the sea seemed capable of welcoming China and all of her masses into its cool depths, swallowing our middle kingdom ten thousand times over.

  Eventually I left my mother and went in search of some tea and something to eat. When I returned she was sitting sideways in a lounge chair on the veranda with her legs tucked under her and her torso turned towards the sea. Her eyes were closed, and she was tilting her face, first this way, then that, to catch the irregular flow of the breeze, and humming softly to herself. I put the tea and a plate of fruit on the low table by her chair, and she opened her eyes, turned to me and took my hand and wrote in my palm with her finger: ‘Xie xie’ – thank you. ‘Bu keqi,’ I wrote back – don’t mention it. Then she turned back to the sea without touching the fruit or the tea. I went inside and lay on my cot and instantly fell asleep.

  When I awoke it was dark. My mother was fast asleep on the bed next to me. Someone had unfurled our mosquito nets over us. I rose and found on the table two sets of chopsticks and three bowls covered with plates. Grilled fish with a hot chilli sauce, spring onions fried with egg, some steamed rice. I divided the meal in two, ate everything that was mine – even the last half-grain of rice – and locked the door to the veranda before undressing and returning to my bed.

  The next morning at dawn my mother woke me and presented me with a small canvas bag. Inside was the notebook my father had kept, with his reflections on his illness. ‘But he wanted this to be published in a medical journal,’ I said. ‘Don’t give this to me. That’s why he wrote it – as case notes for publication. Remember? Like Lu Xun.’

  My mother leaned her head to one side and released a gentle harrumph along with a bitter smile. ‘At this point in the nation’s history I think to tell the masses about his symptoms would be . . . inconvenient,’ she said. ‘And I am sure his wish would be that if it couldn’t be published, it would be given to you to keep.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But you should keep it. Wait for a while and then send it to a medical journal. Why entrust it to me?’

  She placed her hand firmly on my wrist, and drew my arm onto her lap. Her face suddenly lost its colour and went blank, her lower lip settling into an unnatural curl. ‘It’s all I have of him,’ she whispered, not looking at me, but beyond me to the open door and the view of the sea. ‘I gave his records away to Zhu, and the gramophone. Please understand, it’s all I have of him now.’

  She blinked several times.

  ‘But . . . his books,’ I said softly.

  She blinked again, as if she had just woken with a start from a dream, and then exhaled a long harsh sigh. ‘Come walk with me,’ she said, and pulled me to my feet.

  As we walked along the beach my mother explained to me the true circumstances of my father’s death and her own imprisonment. She told the story matter-of-factly, itemising the location of my father’s bedsores, the food the neighbours brought over, the arrangement of pillows she used on the kang to help him sleep in an upright position to stop his coughing, the patient she was treating when she received the news that he was dying, and precisely which records Zhu Shaozen continued to play to him after he had lost consciousness. These details and their randomness puzzled me at first; but I realised that they were simply those things that had lodged in her memory. For once she was leaving nothing out, and I sensed that this slow accretion of minute facts was to compensate for her inability to impose any order upon what she felt, even to know what it was she felt, during those days.

  She told me more about the doctor from Beijing who was assigned to treat my father during his last illness – how he had arrived one day while she was at work, bringing with him a laryngoscope and canisters of oxygen and a canvas mask to help my father’s breathing, asking Zhu, who was in attendance, to push aside the medicines my mother kept on her shelf, her mandrake root and her lunar caustic, her colloids and her extract of ipecacuanha, and stocking the shelf instead with vials of atropine and emetics and expectorants. He had introduced himself to my father when he next woke, receiving from him a confused smile. My mother had arrived home to find him attaching a jar of clear fluid to my father’s forearm. He had explained that his orders were to stay for the duration, and then he sat at the table and made meticulous notes in a large black ledger.

  She was surprised, she said, but relieved. My father’s death would be sanctioned by the People’s Republic. There was now a sense of necessity about it. To die in this way was another service to the masses, the final service he could perform. She was also convinced that his arrival had something to do with my success in Bucharest, although the doctor himself could not or would not confirm that.

  On the night my father’s breathing lapsed into agonal rasping, the doctor took my mother aside and told her the end could still be days away. His orders were not to leave his side, he told her, so that he could witness any last words, although he doubted there would be any more words.

  That night the electricity failed, and my mother and the doctor lit candles and put them around the room, filling it slowly with the smell of pork grease and smoke. Zhu joined them, bringing firewood with which they stoked the kang. He started to play through all of my father’s Brahms collection, starting with the four symphonies in order and the festival overture. My mother took each completed record from the gramophone and returned it to its brown paper sleeve as Zhu placed the next dark circle of shellac onto the platen and wound the handle.

  Around ten p.m. the doctor sent Zhu to get some more oxygen from the hospital chemist, in case their supplies did not last out the night. As soon as Zhu left, the doctor took my mother by the arm into the courtyard. ‘This could take days,’ he said. ‘Or I could give him a large dose of morphine now, and it will be a matter of hours. You know how it is. I assure you I would not record that in my notes, if you promise not to mention it to anyone.’

  My mother agreed. They returned to the room where my father lay and she watched as he broke open the vial and filled the syringe. As he was about to administer it, she told me, she had to turn away. She could not witness that.

  When Zhu arrived back with the oxygen my mother came to the gate to admit him. She was carrying the Brahms symphonies in their paper sleeves. ‘I have put on the first of the sonatas,’ she said, and took the first of the symphonies and brought it down heavily against the concrete side of the fish pond, breaking it. Her arm was descending with the second record when Zhu caught it. His eyes sought hers.

  ‘Because . . .’ she said, her eyes filling with angry tears.

  ‘Please, not yet,’ Zhu said, and pulled her back into the warmth.

  The three of them sat by the kang through the small hours of the night, listening to the music from the gramophone – the sonatas, the trios, the quartets, the quintets, the sextets, the octets, and then the concertos – stoking the fire beneath the bed and relighting the candles when they went out. It was while the great second piano concerto was playing that the doctor put his ear to my father’s chest and announced that his breath had faded into nothingness.

  ‘There. See,’ my mother said to the doctor, ‘no last words.’

  ‘I will record that,’ the doctor smiled, and then he took a surgical needle and thread from his bag. My mother looked at him quizzically. ‘You will understand that our instructions are always to sew up the lips of the dead,’ he said. ‘Especially for Party leaders. Just for appearances, in case they lie in state somewhere.’

  ‘And have something they want to say?’ asked my mother. ‘Some message from beyond?’

  He grinned quietly. After he had finished the stitching he made some final notes in his ledger, sighing in a workmanlike way over his calligraphy,
and then bade my mother farewell with a warm hand on hers, telling her that he would cable Beijing in the morning and would come back during the day to pack up his instruments and the unused supplies.

  She thanked him and after letting him out and sending Zhu on his way she wrapped her warmest coat around herself and sat in the dark courtyard by my father’s well. She would have cried, she told me, she was intending to cry, except that she heard from somewhere close by the sound of another woman softly sobbing – probably the young woman on the next street, she thought, whose husband had taken to beating her after she had given birth to a stillborn son – and the rhythmic murmur of that other woman’s distress, the way it echoed through the streets like footsteps, somehow sufficed for my mother. This too she told me matter-of-factly – that in the end she had not cried for my father. Instead, after the neighbour’s sobbing had ceased she went and lay by her husband on the heated bed and slept soundly until the dawn woke her.

  *

  The days we spent at the coast had a dreamlike quality. We slept late, ate voraciously and went for long, meandering walks along the beach at low tide – two tall girls, loose-limbed silhouettes, carelessly scattering our footsteps, as the saying goes. On one occasion we were pursued by two barefoot young men from the village who ran after us calling out, ‘Xiao jie, xiao jie, Little sisters, little sisters,’ and upon catching up with us were taken aback to find that we were mother and daughter. They retreated, embarrassed. On our return journey we saw them sharing a cigarette in the shade of a tree, and they waved politely to us.

  We did not speak much on our walks, although on several occasions my mother seemed on the brink of saying something, only to retreat into herself wearing a frown, dissatisfied with the words that had assembled in her mind. When I pressed her for her thoughts she would whisper a formula of gratitude, for the guest house, for the food which the caretaker brought to us several times a day, and for the honour I had brought upon her and myself by my playing and my international prize.

  Often as we walked my mother would stop and look out to sea, as if she had heard a voice from amongst the restive waves. I would scan the horizon, searching for a lone swimmer or an injured seabird, but to no avail. I would speak softly to my mother, but she ignored me, and after a time she would turn and continue along the beach.

  It occurred to me after a while that the sea itself was calling to her, inviting her to view its change of aspect: now rucked like a velvet curtain swaying in the onshore breeze, now hard and gelid as if it were a frozen mass marked by cracks and drifts, now an expanse of brocade flecked with silver threads thrown up by shuttles of air, now quivering in hard sunlight like mercury, throwing off sparks of reflected brilliance from its curved edges. ‘Do you know that proverb, “Nu ren xin, hai di zhen”?’ she said to me suddenly, on our last day. ‘A woman’s heart is like a needle at the bottom of the ocean. I have always liked that proverb, but until now I had never seen the ocean, so I could not understand it. I have always asked myself: what would it be like, for one’s heart to be a needle, and for that needle to be buried in the depths of the ocean?’

  ‘Now that you have seen the ocean, does it help you understand the proverb?’

  She was silent for a long while, as we continued to walk along the shore. We came to the staircase and began our ascent to the cliff top and the guest house. I thought she had forgotten my question, or decided not to respond, but at the top of the stairs she turned to me and spoke: ‘Yes, yes, it does help. How could it not?’

  That night we ate together quietly in our room. Through the window I could see the silvery-white cheek of the moon turned three-quarters, and below it, on the surface of the ocean, a long silken scarf stretched before us, tightly woven and luminous in the far distance, but becoming more and more frayed the closer it came to the shore, its weft more and more interlaced with darkness. My mother had borrowed from me a sleeveless cotton top, and I remember observing the light from the moon and our two candles shaping the folds of skin on her neck and collarbones, which were tough and shiny like the buttresses of a tree. When she had finished eating she put her chopsticks down and began to speak, unprompted. ‘I am so glad that you are now a child of our nation’s history, that you can disown your parents if the need arises.’

  ‘Now why would I do that?’ I said. ‘I am proud of my parents, just as proud as I am of anything else – my country, my playing, anything.’

  ‘By all means be proud of these things,’ she said. ‘And of your father and me. What I said is that I am glad you do not need to be. You are not in my shadow or in your father’s. Even when the sun shines, a shadow can be a cold place.’ I looked away, not quite knowing what to say. I could see she was not in the mood to be contradicted, and I did not want to stop her talking. ‘You remember the proverb,’ she went on: ‘Mountains stand far apart, so as not to touch each other with their shadows.’

  She began to explain to me how it was my father’s books and records that had brought about his arrest and imprisonment. It was the works of bourgeois composers and mathematicians in his possession that his accusers had pounced upon. He tried to argue with them (‘How can mathematics be bourgeois?’), but was shouted down. It was their discovery of his copy of Lao Tzu that crowned his humiliation. They forced him to walk through the streets with a gag around his mouth on which they had written, ‘The Way that can be spoken is not the true Way’.

  ‘But did he ever betray the Communist Party?’ I asked.

  ‘Not with his heart,’ she said. ‘But I believe he may have with his mind. It began when he became sick, when he started getting confused about doors. Do you remember? I think at that time he began to doubt the reality of everything. He began to read Lao Tzu a great deal, although we never discussed it. So of course he must have asked himself whether the Party was right in everything it does and says.’

  ‘But only to doubt,’ I said. ‘Does to doubt also mean to betray?’

  ‘Yes it does,’ she said, growing stern all of a sudden. ‘In China, at this time, to doubt means to betray. If you do not understand that now then I am sure one day you will. Life will teach you that one day.’ I opened my mouth to speak again, but she put a finger to my lips. ‘There is something I have for you,’ she said. ‘It has been in my suitcase.’ She walked to her cot, lifted her case onto the mattress and snapped open the locks. She took out a large box and set it in front of me on the table. I did not need to open the box, but I did. Inside, wrapped in its slip of blue silk, was the red wooden body of the violin that Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume had pieced together in his Paris workshop in 1860. I lifted it from the case and noticed again the bulges in the velvet lining. ‘The letters are there too,’ my mother said. ‘They told me about the letters. It would have been unwise for them to take them back to the Soviet Union. I urged Piroshka to burn them, but she refused. The letters go wherever the violin goes, she said. The violin is not complete without the letters. Be careful with them.’

  The next morning we took the bus back to the Shanghai Railway Station, and waited for an hour for the north-bound train. When the public address system announced its imminent departure we embraced on the platform, surrounded by swirls of steam and jostled by other passengers eager to get onto the train and claim their seats. My mother cupped my face in both her hands and examined my forehead, as if for signs of injury or illness. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said, and was gone from my life, leaving only the clammy imprint of her fingers on my cheeks.

  In the letters we exchanged in the years that followed she never hinted at any of what we had talked about at the beach house, never mentioned my father, or Kasimir and Piroshka, never even implied by some omission or lacuna that they had existed. I told myself that she feared that her letters were intercepted by the authorities; but in my heart I knew that she would not have written any more if our correspondence had been secure. My mother’s essential skill, her way of dealing with the world, was to allow things that were painful or troublesome to slip into n
on-existence and then to make a whole out of what remained. She used it with her patients, performing amputations as acts of mercy; and she also used it to survive the humiliations of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and, years later, my own defection. I remembered that when I was a child I would sometimes watch her deep in reflection, and would sense that she was scoring a hard line around something in her mind – some memory, some incident, some emotion – before applying the gentle acid of her intellect to erase it from her thoughts. When she was finished she would come to herself and look up. I would ask her what she had been thinking, and she would say, ‘mei shi, nothing,’ and a smile of contentment would break across her face like a new day. And I knew that whatever it was that had troubled her it was now indeed . . . nothing.

  *

  When I got back to my room I placed the violin case on my bed and opened it. I sat on the small wooden stool and waited for something to happen, imagining perhaps that the instrument would somehow rise from its case and float around the room. After a while I picked it up and examined it carefully, as I would any new instrument I was about to play. I strummed the strings and corrected the tuning, and then put it under my chin and took the bow in my right hand, wondering to myself what I would play. But the hard surface of the instrument stung my left cheek, warm skin meeting cold lacquer, and this tiny shock awoke something in me, a fear or revulsion I could not name. I quickly put the violin back into its case, and left the room and sat in the stairwell for a minute, before making my way down the stairs.