The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  ‘This is a great honour for the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra,’ I said. ‘Have you told Conductor Li about this?’

  ‘No,’ said Director Ho. ‘I am telling you first, because you will be the soloist. This is Xian’s lost violin concerto, and you will deliver the premiere performance. China has supreme confidence in your ability.’

  ‘China does?’

  ‘We do too.’

  I tried without success to recall any mention of a lost violin concerto by Xian Xinghai. Meanwhile Ho went to his desk, and took a shallow cardboard file box from one of its drawers. ‘Here is the score,’ he said. ‘You must learn it quickly and well.’ He put the box in front of me. The characters of Xian Xinghai’s name were stencilled on the top. ‘What is more,’ he said, dropping his voice and placing his hand on the box reverently, ‘I must ask you not to show this to Comrade Meretrenko, or to tell him or anyone else about the performance in Beijing. This matter is highly confidential. I myself will talk to Conductor Li about finding an accompanist who can help you prepare. In the meantime, assume that only you and I and Madame Huang know about the performance, and even about the existence of this score.’

  ‘Perhaps Tian Mei Yun could help me prepare,’ I suggested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ho said, raising an eyebrow; and then he began to shake his head. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘When did Xian Xinghai compose the concerto?’ I asked. ‘I have never heard it mentioned.’

  ‘In 1945, while he was in Moscow,’ He explained, ‘It was the last work he wrote before his death. It has recently come into my possession.’

  I opened the box. The pages of the score were loose. Inscribed in neat hand-written characters at the top of the first page were the words: The people suffer under the boot of foreign oppressors, but secretly plan their revenge. Director Ho explained that the concerto was a programmatic work in four movements. The first was slow and brooding, as befitted its title. The second movement – faster and more difficult – was entitled: The Party, the vanguard of the people, defeats the hapless occupiers and assembles their captives in the town square. The mood becomes sombre in the third movement, he said: The masses gather to try the crimes of their oppressors, offering them the opportunity to confess at the point of a gun, and receive lenient treatment. He turned the pages to the final movement, which had the longest title of all: The people celebrate their victory, dancing on the bones of those who refuse to confess their crimes and acknowledge the rightness of Mao Zedong thought and the historical inevitability of socialist victory.

  ‘I must leave you here for a while,’ Director Ho said, ‘I have some visitors to attend to. Please study the score here in my office. For the time being I cannot allow you to take it away. Once we have an accompanist I will give you exclusive use of one of the practice rooms. In due course you will have rehearsals with the orchestra too.’

  I began to read the score to myself, taking it in one bar at a time, trying to meld together the violin solo with the multiple lines of accompanying music for the various parts of the orchestra. I found this impossible. I was used to reading scores for violin and piano, and perhaps a cello as well; but I lacked the capacity to hold five or six separate parts in my head at the same time, let alone the different timbres of strings, brass, woodwind and percussion. Eventually, I simply read through the violin part.

  It was not at all like Xian Xinghai’s other works. It was a melancholy work in a minor key, and I could not recall him ever composing something so emotionally charged. Of course, by 1945 he had been stranded in the Soviet Union for five years by the war, longing to return to his homeland and his family; he would also have been contemplating his own death in the dank Moscow hospital where he was receiving treatment, so it was easy for me to imagine the inspiration for the first movement – long, sleepless nights spent reflecting upon his own mortality, listening to footsteps echo down strange hallways, and, apart from the music in his head, hearing only the murmurings of nurses and doctors in a language he had not learned. If this was right, however, it seemed strange that he would choose to compose a programmatic work concerning Mudanjiang, a dusty city in my home province, and a liberation which had not to my knowledge acquired any degree of fame in recent Chinese military history.

  By the time I came to the end of the second movement, I was certain that this work was not by Xian Xinghai, or any other Chinese composer. There were no echoes at all of traditional Chinese music, and none of the familiar homage to Beethoven and Mozart. I turned over the last page of the second movement and studied the opening bars of the third: The masses gather to try the crimes of their oppressors, offering them the opportunity to confess at the point of a gun, and receive lenient treatment. The booming kettle drum led off, with the bass strings and the brass section playing fortissimo, and I began to laugh out loud, not in the least surprised to find that I was reading the passacaglia from Shostakovich’s violin concerto, whose premiere performance I had given in the parlour of a small house in Harbin nine years earlier. I suspect a part of my mind had already picked up the repeated pattern of notes throughout the first two movements, the D – E-flat – C – B sequence that spelt out the composer’s name. I immediately looked down the margin of the page and, finding the word cor ingles at the end of a stave, ran my finger along the line that Shostakovich wrote for Piroshka’s oboe.

  Director Ho returned, bringing with him Madame Huang. I rose to my feet and poured both of them a cup of tea from the urn, being careful to hand them their cups using both hands – first, Director Ho, then, Madame Huang. My politeness put them on edge.

  ‘I am honoured that Premier Zhou believes that I am the right person to play at the banquet in September,’ I began. ‘But my talent is as yet undeveloped. I feel I should refuse this assignment, and continue my studies for another five years. Perhaps then I will be ready to be a soloist for such an occasion.’

  I could tell that my show of customary self-deprecation carried no weight. Director Ho sighed irritably and picked up his tea cup delicately between his thumb and index finger. ‘It is out of the question,’ he said. ‘The matter is decided. You should not doubt yourself when China has no such doubts itself.’

  ‘So what is it you really want to say?’ Madame Huang eyed me.

  ‘There is a question I want to ask,’ I said. ‘Is there a reason why you are attempting to pass off a work by Dmitri Shostakovich as if it were by Xian Xinghai? It may help me in my preparation if I know why. That’s all.’

  Director Ho’s tea cup – which was describing an ascending arc towards his mouth – halted and performed two unsteady loops before continuing its journey. There was silence for a moment, and then both of them spoke at once: ‘You must . . .’ started Madame Huang; ‘You see . . .’ started Director Ho. And both fell silent again.

  ‘I must . . . see,’ I repeated. ‘What must I see?’

  ‘You must see,’ said Madame Huang, glancing at Director Ho, ‘that both truth and falsehood can serve the interests of socialism.’

  ‘Well said,’ Director Ho smiled and wagged his finger at me in excitement. ‘And indeed, one might say that there is no falsehood intended. It is important that our guests recognise the true origins of the music as well; if not during the performance, then at least afterwards. You see, we trust their intelligence as much as we can obviously trust yours. Premier Zhou does not want them to be deceived, nor even to think that we are trying to deceive them. After all, what is the point, if they do not recognise that it is Soviet music we are playing for them, with Chinese characteristics added?’

  ‘But this is a composer who is out of favour in the Soviet Union,’ I said. ‘His music has been criticised as reactionary and chaotic. It will be an insult to play it.’

  ‘And in recognition of that we have renamed it as The Liberation of Mudanjiang, and attributed it to a Chinese composer, and given programmatic titles to each movement,’ said Director Ho.

  It must have registered on my face that the logic of this state
ment had escaped me. Madame Huang leaned towards me and said, ‘Director Ho has discussed this matter with Premier Zhou, and’ – she glanced towards Ho, who met her eyes and nodded to her – ‘also with Chairman Mao Zedong. These are the instructions we have received, and indeed Mao himself helped to compose the titles for each movement.’

  ‘And enjoyed himself immensely doing it,’ Director Ho smiled.

  ‘We need to trust the judgement of Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou,’ Madame Huang said.

  ‘I have arranged for you to have exclusive use of practice room number four,’ Director Ho said, ‘but you will need to come to my office first to collect the score and the key to the practice room, and you must return both to me once you have finished practicing for the day. You are excused from all other classes, including your lessons with Comrade Meretrenko.’

  ‘And as for your other duties,’ said Madame Huang, ‘we have found another young woman who understands Russian. She will move into your room today and will take over your responsibilities. Her name is Fan Hong. You will move immediately to new lodgings close to the Conservatory. You see? We have thought of everything.’

  12. A Child of History

  We travelled by train to Beijing in September of 1959 – the sixty-five members of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Conductor Li, Director Ho and me. We occupied two carriages of the train, and a third was piled high with our kettledrums, double basses, cellos and tubas. I kept Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume on the seat beside me. I had the score of the violin concerto in my suitcase, but hardly needed to consult it any more. It was everywhere I looked: on the ceiling of the sleeping compartment, suspended from the telephone lines along the side of the railway track, in the wet, glistening streets of passing villages and towns, and the low profile of distant, purple mountain ranges. I had played through the piece several times with the orchestra, after weeks of closeted practice with Fa Jilin, the head of the department of piano. The orchestra was excited by the music, and the prospect of a gala performance in Beijing and the premiere of a new work by Xian Xinghai, and if any of them had any doubt about its attribution to our great national composer none betrayed it.

  In Beijing the streets were hung with banners proclaiming the tenth anniversary of the Liberation. There were open-air screenings of patriotic movies. The army had distributed extra rations of soybeans and rice and brought truckloads of pigs into the city to redden the cheeks of the locals for the big day. Every day, every hour, it seemed, there were parades through the streets – of workers, of peasants from Hunan and Guizhou, of ethnic minorities from Sichuan and Xinjiang in their feathered costumes, of school children in white shirts – all of them converging on Tiananmen Square, in whose centre rose a cream plaster statue of Mao, three metres tall, guarded by a circle of unblinking Communist Youth League members in starched shirts and red scarves.

  This is where we came too, on the morning after our arrival, to rehearse in the Great Hall of the People which had risen on the west side of the square, one of the Ten Great Constructions, completed in ten months, by ten thousand volunteers, to mark the Tenth Anniversary. From the stage where we unpacked our instruments we watched workmen moving around the vast, dark cavern of the auditorium like an infestation of ants: painting walls, installing seats, laying carpet, erecting decorative panels, or hanging spider-like from the ceiling amidst tangles of wires and lights.

  Conductor Li came and stood beside me. He was a silver-haired man with an upright, chest out, military bearing, dressed in an immaculately pressed zhongshan suit. He had spent much of his life in France and England, and had returned to China after 1949 in response to the Communist Party’s call for expatriate Chinese intellectuals to return to serve their nation. Together we looked into the gloom of the hall, and then up to the ceiling, from which hung a series of radiating rings of lights in the shape of the mayflower blossom, with the red star at the centre. He seemed at a loss for words, and I felt the same way. Surely, I thought to myself, in the presence of such a symbol of our race and nation, there were things that could be said, indeed should be said. But nothing came.

  As the arrival of the foreign dignitaries drew near, the banners on the streets welcomed Premier Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Gromyko, and boxes of miniature Soviet flags were deposited at schools, hotels and factories and on street corners. Director Ho told me that I was to be part of the official welcoming party at the airport, along with Conductor Li, the orchestra leader, Ho himself, representatives of China’s ethnic minorities, and senior military personnel.

  I could not sleep the night before their arrival, and I crept past the guard at our hostel before dawn and walked towards the Avenue of Heavenly Peace. ‘Watch out!’ a voice hissed from above me as I turned the corner. Something fell to the flagstone beside me with a loud metallic clank, and as I shrank backwards a white banner fluttered onto the pavement ahead of me. ‘Sorry,’ the voice said. A young man had shimmied up a power pole, and was clinging by his knees in the darkness several metres above me.

  ‘What are you doing up there?’ I asked.

  ‘Following orders,’ he replied, and descended rapidly to the pavement beside me. ‘Orders from Zhongnanhai itself, from the leaders’ compound.’ He smiled and spun a small spanner around his index finger, threw it into the air and caught it. ‘We are to take down the banners and retrieve the flags.’ As we walked together to the next pole he told me that they had also rescinded the directive to the school children, factory workers and university students to assemble along the airport route. ‘Just an ordinary day in Beijing today,’ he said.

  I continued on my way towards Tiananmen, walking under more of the banners bearing Premier Khrushchev’s image. I watched the red ball of the sun rise above the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and recalled the newsreel my father had brought back to Harbin exactly ten years earlier showing Mao’s speech from atop the gate. The immense square was empty except for a pair of street-sweepers and four soldiers standing to attention around Mao’s statue, guarding the acres of cold flagstone. As I retraced my steps I met the young man again, hanging by his legs from the top of another pole, folding up one of the last of the red banners into a neat triangle.

  An hour later I drove with Director Ho towards the airport against the centripetal flow of cyclists and buses. The welcoming party milled around on the tarmac as a team of workers set out rolls of red carpet in a line that led from a small podium out to the place where the Premier’s plane would come to rest. An honour guard was forming up next to us, helmets held tight by their chin straps, rifles snapping around into various positions at the bark of an officer – across the chest, parallel with the torso, butt resting on the ground next to a polished brown boot, then back to the beginning again, and then again. It was hot in the sun, and I watched as Madame Sun Yat-sen, dressed in a thick woollen coat, produced a fan to cool herself, prompting several others to follow suit with whatever they could find in their pockets. I found myself positioned towards the end of the line, between Director Ho and the representative of the Miao people. To the latter I spoke a few words of greeting in the Miao language. We talked about my summer cultural labouring, and in the midst of our conversation he produced a Soviet flag, and started to fan his face with it. A military policeman tapped him on the shoulder and relieved him of the offending item.

  The crowd suddenly grew silent. Someone had heard the noise of a plane and was making a shushing noise. When nothing appeared in the sky we started talking again. A man in uniform ran out from the terminal building and whispered into the ear of the officer in charge of the honour guard. ‘You can’t be serious!’ the officer said loudly. ‘Are you sure? Well, be it on your own head if you are mistaken.’ He called the honour guard to attention, their dark shadows pooling around their feet, and with a few sharp commands had them marching back to the terminal, just as the Premier’s jet plane arrived. It touched down with a loud whoosh and a long, low moan, and then slipped along the runway with pneumatic squeals and sprays of dust and disappe
ared from our view behind some hangars. We quickly formed into rows again along one side of the red carpet, clearing our throats, arranging our clothing and experimenting with different positions for our hands.

  Eventually the plane nosed around the end of the terminal building and lumbered towards us, its engines emitting a high-pitched whine. It came to a stop at the end of the red carpet, and a team of soldiers pushed the metal staircase against its fuselage. The engines died, and started to make ticking noises. We waited for several minutes. Nothing happened. Madame Sun Yat-sen fanned herself again. The Miao chief hummed to himself. Then a large black Volga emerged from behind the honour guard and drove at no more than walking pace to the foot of the staircase. Two men stepped from it onto the end of the red carpet. I recognised Premier Zhou Enlai, and Liu Shaoqi, the General Secretary of the Communist Party – both dressed in light blue zhongshan suits with four pockets on the front of the jacket. And then, in a darker blue suit, Mao Zedong emerged from the car.

  The door of the plane opened and Nikita Khrushchev pushed his way out and almost bounced down the stairs. He was like a cartoon figure: short, with a shiny bald head, perfectly round like one of those wooden knobs on the end of a balustrade, and an enormous protruding chest and overhanging belly that were barely held in by one precarious button on his single-breasted jacket. I had the impression that if that button were to give way, the whole of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would burst forth with a roar and a clatter. He thrust his hand into Mao’s and then clasped him in a bear hug. He greeted Zhou and Liu in the same way, both men grinning helplessly over Khrushchev’s meaty shoulder. Andrei Gromyko followed him down the stairs, picking his way at a more sedate pace and politely shaking the hands that were offered to him. Even from a distance I recognised his trademark eyebrows, which were even more spectacular than Comrade Meretrenko’s – woolly caterpillars bristling with antennae at their outer edges.