The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  It was mid-afternoon and the building was empty. I stopped by Raya’s apartment and before I knew it I had knocked on the door twice, hoping to find her there, hoping to invite myself in, to ask to speak to her, to confess to her what I knew about her, what we were doing to her, what she meant to us, or even, I thought, censoring myself, just to ask her some inane question about her work, just to look her in the eye and have her look back. There was no reply, and I made my way back to my room, took up the violin and began to play through my repertoire. My Bach, my Mozart, my Kreisler, my Bartók dances, my Chausson, my Saint-Saëns: an endless stream of notes, white, cold, and precise – as precise, I realised, as the ten million planes which my father had shown me in the tiny sliver of light between his thumb and forefinger, those hard, strong, uncomplicated surfaces, one thing only and not another, which had the thickness of a single thought. Then, in the middle of a piece, between two notes in an arpeggio, I stopped and put down my bow. The light outside was fading and in the distance I could hear the bells of the Custom House telling me that the east was now red, even though it was towards the west that the sky had turned pink. There was a noise in the stairwell and Ling Ling entered the room and greeted me with kisses and took my arm and insisted we go for a walk before dark. We ate at the refectory, and although I partook of her happy conversation and told her about the guest house at the sea and answered in part her questions about my mother and let her rest her head on my shoulder as we walked through the darkness back to our building, I knew where I wanted to be. So I left her in the room, telling her I had to go and see Madame Huang, stepped noisily down the first flight of stairs before retracing my steps quietly, and, levering open the window, made my way down the fire escape to my listening post, where I lay on my back waiting for Raya to return.

  Almost immediately I heard voices and smelt the sweet aroma of the flowers Kirill had brought and the musky trails of his cologne. What followed was a successful evening for all of us. Kirill and Raya ate and drank, tortured themselves with suppressed laughter, and made a breathy, urgent, muscular kind of love on the couch, without musical accompaniment. (They did, however, place Kirill’s shirt over the stuffed bird, which Raya insisted was leering at her. ‘It must be a young male,’ she complained.) I averted my eyes from the ventilation grille, although all I could have seen was a tangle of feet and discarded clothing. Afterwards, lying naked on the couch, they shared a cigarette and began to speak softly. I took out a pencil stub and leant my ear into the striations of light that fell across my notebook from the grille, straining to pick up what they were saying.

  ‘He has gone then?’ Raya said. ‘Is the rumour true?’

  ‘Yudin?’ Kirill said. ‘Yes, he is gone. Where to, no one knows, except that he would be wise to avoid Moscow for a while.’

  ‘What was his crime?’

  ‘He lost the joint fleet. A terrible bungle.’

  ‘Can one lose an entire fleet?’

  ‘If it only ever existed on paper, yes. Militarily speaking, it was a fine idea. But it’s stillborn now. Mao shouted at him, called him names, accused us of trying to seize the whole of the Chinese coastline as a naval base and to consign the PLA to the interior; and instead of taking it like a man and playing him along, Yudin summoned Khrushchev from Moscow, and what happened next . . . well, it is now history, and is known within diplomatic circles as the Battle of the Dumpling Baths.’

  ‘Dumpling baths?’ Raya said. ‘Tell me more, or are these dumplings secret?’

  ‘It is no secret,’ Kirill laughed. ‘Far from it. Khrushchev himself is telling everyone he meets, every troop of Georgian dancers, every African ambassador, every delegation of American farmers. Clearly he thinks by telling the story himself he will avoid complete humiliation.’

  ‘Do tell, then.’

  ‘It is a simple story. On the second day of Khrushchev’s visit we are told that Mao will meet us at his residence, and when we arrive we find him in his swimming pool. He invites Khrushchev to join him, and even has a pair of shorts ready for the purpose. So we have Khrushchev flopping around, toes barely touching the bottom, clutching onto a life-ring that somebody has thrown him, and getting water up his nose, while Mao calmly swims around him like a seal – backstroke, breaststroke, then the crawl, then backstroke again, blowing spumes of water into the air, turning somersaults under the water, and talking the whole time through an interpreter running up and down the side of the pool after him – talking about Marx and Lenin and collectivism in agriculture and the communes. It was a great performance, like an emperor baiting a visiting barbarian.’

  ‘And where are you all this time, Kirill?’ Raya asked. ‘Stirring the dumplings?’

  ‘I am guarding the First Secretary’s clothes, until the two men end up chest to chest in the middle of the pool, arguing like a pair of rutting walruses, and Khrushchev signals to us to join him to explain the joint fleet proposal.’

  ‘To join him in the pool?’

  ‘Yes, because he did not trust Mao’s interpreter, and so Yudin and I stripped down to our underwear and waded into the water and we bobbed about like corks, with Yudin translating for Khrushchev, who was still clutching his life-ring, and Mao floating on his back with only his face and his stomach above the surface, and the rest of us treading water and trying to save the joint fleet proposal, which, you can imagine . . .’

  ‘. . . sank without trace,’ Raya said, and the two bellowed with laughter.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Kirill.

  ‘And what a tragedy,’ Raya said. ‘Like the Battle of Tsushima Strait all over again, only in miniature.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ Kirill’s laughter collapsed into coughing. ‘Don’t say that, even though it’s true. Our joint fleet lies wrecked at the bottom of that pool. It was all Yudin and I could do to tow the First Secretary out of the range of Mao’s guns, get him back into his clothes and get out of there. And then in the car, Khrushchev turns to Yudin – water stains still on his shirt and his tie over his collar and one cuff-link missing – and he says, “How do you think that went?”’

  ‘And Yudin says “swimmingly”, does he?’

  ‘Not exactly – before Yudin could respond the shouting began, and it didn’t let up for three hours. You know how long our First Secretary can go on for.’

  Raya rose from the couch and poured another round of drinks.

  ‘Is this bad?’ she said, as she stood over Kirill, balancing her glass on his upraised knee.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kirill. ‘We are told they will start shelling Jinmen and Mazu any day, to soften it up for an invasion. The US fleet will be in the Taiwan Strait within a week, perhaps sooner. We will be obliged to come out in support of the Chinese. Thank God they haven’t got a bomb ready yet, since I could never convince them that the bomb is something you have, but never use.’

  ‘And your visit to Washington?’

  ‘I believe Khrushchev’s resolve will hold. He will go to Washington regardless. Besides, things are very fragile in Beijing. The leadership is a leaning tower; it must fall soon. The starvation in the countryside is horrific. There has been no harvest, none at all, because during planting time the peasants were at their village furnaces pretending to make steel. By God, it is bad. Today I spoke to one of our engineers newly returned from Sichuan. It is ghastly, he says, worse than what he witnessed in the Ukraine during the Holodomor: piles of corpses, whole villages wiped out by cholera, mobs rioting in the cities and towns, smoke swirling everywhere from half-burnt bodies, and no rats, he said, because whenever one pokes its head out of the sewer the people trap it and eat it.’

  ‘Did they not fight a war to be free of that kind of thing? And didn’t we fight the same war?’ Raya said. ‘Get dressed, Kirill. I cannot talk about famine to a naked man. Here is your shirt. Put it on quickly, the phoenix bird is staring at you.’ She rose from the couch and began to retrieve her clothes.

  ‘And, there are responsible people in Beijing whose hand we need to strengt
hen,’ Kirill went on, reaching one arm into a sleeve. ‘There is Zhou Enlai, of course, and Chen Yun and Peng De Huai, and Liu Shaoqi, perhaps, and there is Deng Xiao Ping, about whom we are less certain. So I have been arguing that the nuclear treaty should be quietly revoked, or at least delayed so long and so persistently that China will realise it is a dead letter. And I believe my view has won the day.’

  ‘So I should conclude my research quickly and pack my bags?’ Raya said. ‘Or should I move into the basement immediately to escape the fallout?’

  ‘Not yet, not yet,’ Kirill said, watching her as she finished dressing.

  ‘When will they be told that the treaty is a dead letter?’

  ‘Khrushchev himself will tell them when he visits again in September,’ he said, speaking more rapidly as he pulled on his trousers, buckled his belt and searched for his socks. ‘He and Gromyko will come to Beijing for the Tenth Anniversary of the Liberation. The timing will be perfect, because they will be newly returned from Washington. They will have “peaceful coexistence” written all over their faces, and if they succeed the Americans will have agreed to withdraw their missiles from Taiwan and to support an Asian Nuclear Free Zone. There you have it.’

  Raya lit a cigarette and leant back on the table edge. ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘Your plan is very nice. I see you have become an optimist all of a sudden, Kirill.’

  ‘Diplomats are always optimists,’ Kirill said. ‘I am not dispirited. Yudin’s failure is not a tragedy, but an opportunity. I see that very clearly. We are composers too, or conductors, perhaps, after a fashion. What is that term you use, when a piece of music draws you back to the key in which it started, makes you expect it, and long for it, even if you are only dimly aware of it?’

  ‘The return to the tonic.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Kirill. He had finished dressing and he took Raya’s cigarette from her raised hand, took a puff from it and slotted it carefully back between her fingers. ‘That is the diplomat’s art – to lead nations into harmony, without their knowing it. They think they are pursuing their own ends, but we shape their thoughts and actions, like an invisible hand, so that it will be the most natural thing in the world for Beijing to . . .’

  ‘My God, Kirill,’ Raya said. She turned away from him. ‘Are you all innocents? Is this how you all think? You military planners and strategists?’

  ‘No, my love,’ Kirill said, turning his attention to his tie and flicking one end around the other twice to form a loose knot. ‘Most of us don’t think, you know that.’

  ‘Don’t mock me. You know what I have given up for you. I want to know it is all worthwhile.’

  ‘I too have given things up. For you.’

  ‘Oh yes, the wife you never told me about.’

  ‘What would you have wanted to know?’ he said, with a voice starting to fray. ‘It is the same story of all young marriages, isn’t it? Innocent deception on both sides.’

  Raya was silent. I peered through the grille, but could only see her from behind. Her arms were half-folded and she was holding the cigarette, now burned down to a stub, next to her temple in one curled hand, dabbing at her hairline with her fingers. Kirill pulled sharply at his tie and moved to the window opposite, peering down into the dark street.

  ‘It was during the war,’ Kirill began, talking swiftly. ‘I was a young officer fighting in the South. She was from my home village, one of a dozen or so sisters and friends who would let the boys tease them when we were home from the front on furlough. I could hardly remember which one she was. Anyway, she started to write me letters, simple, earnest ones to keep up my morale. I had a corporal in my unit who was from the same village, and he received them from another of the girls, letters which were almost identical to mine. We imagined them, those girls, sitting around a table in their sarafans after a morning of making bullets or rolling bandages, writing these letters to order, not knowing that at the front we would scour every word and the shape of each letter looking for some whiff of sex, and not finding it.’

  Wordlessly, Raya pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, resting her elbow on the table and leaning her forehead on her hand.

  ‘Smile if you want,’ Kirill said. ‘Laugh if you want. At the front that’s what you do. So when the war was over I went back to the village to see my parents and she was with them at the station, arm in arm with my father, with a bold game-hen kind of look, and small eyes that pointed at me like fingers.’

  ‘So you marry her.’

  ‘I marry her,’ he said. ‘Within a year there are twins, boys; then another one, a girl; and another. I join the diplomatic corps and we move to Moscow. I travel every month, but that doesn’t stop it. Two more boys, a girl who died within days of her birth, then another girl. My God it was like fucking the earth, it brought forth fruit in such abundance.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this? Why are you ridiculing this poor woman and her children in front of me?’

  Kirill turned from the window. ‘I thought it would make you feel better.’

  ‘I feel fine already. I don’t need you to improve my mood.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. I thought from what you said that you needed . . .’

  ‘Needed what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well, tell me her name then.’

  ‘Why? If you are not interested . . .’

  ‘Tell me. What is it? Zinaida? Malanya? Galina?’

  ‘No, it’s Nadezhda.’

  ‘God, no. Not that. Not “hope”.’

  ‘Everyone has to have a name.’

  ‘Lasciate ogni speranza,’ Raya said softly.

  ‘What’s that? What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a line from an opera about China, Puccini’s Turandot. A line about hope, after a fashion. Forget it. Nadezhda is a good name.’

  ‘It’s a name for a certain kind of goodness, I agree,’ Kirill sighed. ‘I must go now. I have work to do tonight. I must call the new ambassador in Beijing.’ He took up his jacket and swung it over his shoulders. ‘So, you are angry with me?’

  ‘Not angry,’ Raya said, ‘I am just wondering how far this innocence will take you.’

  ‘It has got me this far, and I had hoped it would take me a very long way.’

  ‘Well, we shall give it a try, shall we?’ She stubbed out her cigarette and drew a circle around the edge of his face with her finger, drawing from him a look of puzzlement and then a smile. ‘Take me with you when you leave Shanghai. Will you do that? And will you kiss me?’

  *

  Madame Huang’s jaw slackened, her eyes grew wide and for a moment I thought she was going to hug me again. ‘Very interesting,’ was all she said, and she got me to repeat what I had heard while she wrote it down. ‘Yes, very interesting,’ she said, ‘I will deal with this immediately. And you must remember to tell no one what you have heard. I cannot believe he has been so misled about rioting in the provinces. I cannot believe he would repeat those malicious counter-revolutionary rumours. What starvation? What disease? What invisible hands?’ She folded up her sheet of paper and put on her jacket. We walked together to the entrance of the building, where she squeezed my hand, hailed a bicycle rickshaw and disappeared down the street. Later that day I received a note from Madame Huang telling me that she and Director Ho were going to Beijing for ‘discussions’ and ordering me to report any further developments to Professor Yu.

  A week later I read in the Shanghai Liberation Daily that Marshall Peng De Huai had stepped down as defence minister and had been replaced by Marshall Lin Biao. It emerged in the following months that at the Lushan Conference in Jiangxi Province Peng had boldly criticised the policies of the Great Leap Forward in a personal letter to Mao Zedong, predicting that they would result in mass starvation. Kirill had been right: the crops had not been planted, there was no harvest except the harvest of pig iron from backyard furnaces, some said that twenty million had died, and some said twice that many, and Peng De Huai was the first
within the inner circle willing to say the unsayable. But Mao had reacted swiftly, circulating the letter to the other members of the Politburo, criticising Peng’s continuing friendship towards the Soviet Union, and isolating him so that the other moderates, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi, did not join in the criticism. Deng Xiao Ping stayed in Beijing and kept his head down.

  *

  Ten days later, I received a note instructing me to go immediately to Director Ho’s office. When I entered he was at his piano. He waved me into a chair and as I crossed the room I noticed that he was working on a musical score, part of his personal production quota, I assumed. A breeze blew through the open casement window, rearranging papers on his desk, but Director Ho seemed to notice only the notes he was writing. ‘There,’ he said at last, leaning back in his chair with a satisfied look. ‘An idea for a melody came to me while I was dreaming, and I have been humming it to myself since I got up this morning. Now it is captured forever on paper, like a little songbird in its cage.’ He deposited the score on the table in front of me, and poured himself a cup of tea. Then, remembering himself, he offered me tea also. ‘It will be a song for children,’ he explained. ‘I think I will call it Behind Enemy Lines. I have the words worked out too, and I will add them shortly. What do you think?’

  I glanced along the lines of music. It was a simple melody, strongly reminiscent of the opening theme of the third movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Before I could offer my opinion Director Ho settled himself in the chair opposite me and began to tell me about his visit to Beijing. It had been a very important visit, he said. The Party leaders were very grateful to the Conservatory and to me in particular for tracking down the ‘bad elements’ amongst the Russians. Indeed, Director Ho had mentioned me in person to Premier Zhou Enlai during a private audience, and Zhou – who had already heard of my prize in Bucharest – had asked Director Ho to pass on his personal thanks and commendations for my work.

  ‘Zhou is very interested in the scientific approach to music,’ Director Ho went on. ‘We talked at great length about the value of music as a tool in diplomacy. And we both believe that it is time for music in China to stand up and demonstrate its role in the vanguard of the socialist enterprise.’ He slurped his tea loudly. ‘Premier Zhou has asked for the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra to play at a banquet in September in Beijing. It is to celebrate the visit of Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, which coincides with the Tenth Anniversary of the People’s Republic. He asked me for advice on what music should be played on that occasion, and after some thought I recommended a recently discovered work by Xian Xinghai, called The Liberation of Mudanjiang. It concerns the uprising of the people of Mudanjiang during the rule of the Manchukuo puppet regime.’