The delegation assembled at the foot of the stairs, and were surrounded by scurrying photographers and camera crews with microphones on poles. Mao led Khrushchev towards the welcoming party, clutching his elbow as if he were a blind man, and then stood aside to let Zhou Enlai perform the introductions. Khrushchev had by this time acquired a wide-brimmed fedora to shield his baldness from the sun. An interpreter clung to his side, taking tiny steps so as to keep his mouth by his master’s ear. From a distance it looked as if they had agreed for some reason to share the hat between them.
When they reached me, Zhou calmly introduced me as Xiao Magou, the award-winning violinist, and as the interpreter whispered in Khrushchev’s ear I said loudly, ‘Dobro pozhalovat’ v Kitay, tovarisch Khrushchev.’
Khrushchev stopped and looked at me. ‘You have diphthongs like my father did. Where did you learn to speak Russian like that?’
‘In Harbin,’ I said. ‘My home town.’
‘You learned it from the railway workers then?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘from White Russian exiles.’
Director Ho nudged me in the ankle with his foot.
‘Did you hear that, Andrei Andreyevich?’ Khrushchev said, turning to Gromyko. ‘The ghosts of White Russia are lying in wait for us.’ Zhou smiled at me, and, gently taking Khrushchev’s elbow, propelled him forward and introduced him to Director Ho and Conductor Li.
We stood in the late morning heat while Mao and Khrushchev mounted the podium to speak. A cameraman, wielding a movie camera with a bellows lens and a film carrier on top shaped like large panda’s ears, elbowed his way between me and Director Ho, took his stance and started to film. Mao congratulated Khrushchev on the success of his mission to the USA as an envoy of peace. We clapped politely. Khrushchev congratulated the people of China on their achievements during ten years of communist rule. While in the past it was said that ‘Russia’s present is China’s future,’ he reminded us, he was now convinced that both peoples walked side by side towards the achievement of communism. We clapped politely once more, and suddenly the formalities were over and we were shepherded back to the terminal building.
We were at the tail of the motorcade on the way into the city. It was turning into a hot autumn day. There were peasants resting in the shade of the birch and ash trees, a solitary roadside stall selling melons, and a line of wagons standing along the edge of the road, the drivers holding the bridles of their donkeys as a soldier on a motorcycle blocked their path to let us pass unhindered. Most people were going about their business, barely glancing at the procession of black Volgas. Our driver shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘When their President was here for May Day in 1957, I could hardly see the road for all the people waving Soviet flags and cheering. But today it’s like the plane arrived a day early and caught Beijing unprepared.’
We rehearsed the concerto again that afternoon in a hall attached to our hotel. As we were working on the last few difficult passages Director Ho arrived and called me out into the corridor. ‘Which do you know best, Mozart, Beethoven or Mendelssohn? Which concerto, I mean?’ Before I could answer he lowered his voice and went on, ‘I have received a message from Premier Zhou asking us to be sure to have an alternative piece to perform, should the circumstances require it. We do have an alternative, don’t we?’
‘What circumstances?’ I asked. ‘You never asked for an alternative. Have you talked to the conductor? It’s his orchestra, after all.’
‘We may not get much notice,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘But I suppose it’s a matter of finding the sheet music. Surely there are sixty-five copies of another great violin concerto somewhere in Beijing. I will go looking.’ And he was gone.
The next morning before breakfast, he knocked on the door of my room. ‘It’s Beethoven,’ he said. ‘I have talked to Comrade Li. He is sanguine about it. The scores will be flown up from Shanghai today. Can you believe it? By a jet fighter. What a country this is. Beethoven flies around by jet fighter.’
‘So, to be clear,’ I said, ‘you want us to prepare Beethoven’s violin concerto as an alternative?’
‘Have I not been clear?’ he said.
‘In case relations between the parties improve,’ I said, ‘and The Liberation of Mudanjiang is no longer appropriate.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is the plan. The second line of defence, you might say.’
‘To be ready by tomorrow night to perform in the Great Hall of the People?’
‘Yes,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and added, ‘For China, of course.’
He produced from his jacket a crumpled copy of the People’s Daily and handed it to me. It carried front-page stories on the arrival of Premier Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Gromyko, along with a page of photographs of the event. In one photograph Khrushchev was laughing at some joke with the representatives of the Uighurs and the Tibetans. My left foot had made it into the corner of the frame.
As Director Ho had predicted, the orchestra took the news that we were to prepare the Beethoven concerto as a backup with an air of mild irritation, and a condescending assurance that our audience would not be able to tell the difference between a rushed performance and one that had been rehearsed for weeks. ‘Of course,’ I said to the orchestra leader as she ate her rice congee at breakfast, ‘none of you will be standing in the spotlight playing the solo.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll ask the bassoonist to play your part if you want,’ she said.
We were told that the sheet music would arrive by midday. When it did not, there were hints of unease amongst the orchestra. ‘Do they expect us to make it up from memory?’ someone said. ‘Let’s do that,’ someone else said, and a couple of cellists started playing one of the more famous themes from the concerto, and some horn players joined in. The timpanist added a drum-roll, the violas picked up the melody at the next bar, and things carried on for a while until somehow it turned into a rendition of ‘The East is Red’ in double-time. The performance ended in a blaring crescendo and scattered applause from the hotel staff who were setting up for dinner.
In the event it was early evening before a man dressed in a dusty uniform and thick leather gloves strode into the room. He handed over a large canvas bag to Conductor Li, saluting as he did so. Conductor Li looked nervously at the baton he was holding in his hand, and then put it down on a chair and returned the salute. He unzipped the bag and musical scores spilt out like the seed-pulp from fallen fruit.
As soon as we had the music arranged on our stands, Conductor Li tapped his baton on the lectern and called us to attention. ‘Quiet please, comrades! And as we play just think of the Long March,’ he said. ‘I will be at the front, like Chairman Mao. I will beat the time. Try to keep up. If you get lost, skip a few pages. Hopefully, the rest us of will pass your way eventually, and you can rejoin us. If you fall too far behind I can arrange for you to be shot humanely.’
We set off, aided by our memories of Beethoven and by the swinging of Conductor Li’s baton. The first movement sounded like nothing less than a full-scale military retreat. We were ambushed by missing pages of score, by an impulsive feint by the cellists and double basses, and by a flautist who turned two pages rather than one and played along happily in no man’s land for a dozen or so bars until he was rapped on the head with the end of a clarinet. I tried to hold things together, but added to the confusion by drifting from a major to a minor key, before I was poked in the ribs by the orchestra leader with the end of her bow. The brass section meanwhile had missed an entrance and wandered off the track, and never quite returned. Thus ended the first movement.
‘No time for an interval,’ Conductor Li grumbled amongst the coughing and tuning noises. ‘We have only just started. The next movement is slow, but don’t fall asleep, especially you in the brass section.’ In the event the brass section had to be slowed down several times. I glided through my solos, hoping to hit at least every third or fourth note, and
we persevered, eyes on the road ahead, discarding muffed notes and jangling tempi as if they were the bodies of our dead and wounded.
Conductor Li rushed us onto the third movement, which started with solo violin and went passably well until I got caught in one of Beethoven’s whirlpools, circling around and around while the orchestra watched helplessly. Eventually I found my way out, wet with perspiration, and we carried on, stubbing our orchestral toe on a key change and losing the second violins in a flurry of pointing and angry hissing. And in time we found ourselves turning the last few pages, and saw ahead the final tumble into a cool, safe valley, with the melody like a wind at our backs. At the last emphatic note we sagged into our seats and gave ourselves an exhausted round of applause. ‘At least it’s happier music than the other one,’ the orchestra leader said to me, ‘although you could hardly tell by the way we played it.’
Conductor Li called for quiet. ‘We have survived our first ordeal,’ he said, ‘and climbed the first peak. And now, ladies and gentlemen, let us bury our dead and bind up our wounds and begin again.’
We played the concerto through again, avoiding our earlier mistakes and falling into a different set of errors. The room grew hot with sweaty bodies, and I excused myself and retired to my room for a while to practise some of the more difficult passages. We rehearsed until well after midnight, one run through per hour, until the hotel management asked that we consider taking to our beds before the other guests mutinied.
The following morning a work party arrived at the hotel and carried our instruments the kilometre or so to the Great Hall itself, where we recommenced, amidst paint fumes and the shouts of the workmen and the sounds of their tools. We rehearsed Beethoven throughout the morning, growing more confident and allowing ourselves an occasional smile, and laughing behind our hands at Conductor Li as he grew more irascible. ‘It is not good enough,’ he snapped at one mistake. ‘We may be approaching the peak, but when we lose our footing we slip all the way to the bottom again.’
At half past three, in the middle of an extended solo, I noticed Director Ho striding down the centre aisle of the auditorium towards the stage. I stopped playing. The room fell silent, and Conductor Li glared at me angrily, but when I pointed out the approaching figure with my bow he put down his baton. Ho stepped up beside Conductor Li, took him by the elbow and whispered something in his ear. Conductor Li closed his eyes and took a long breath. Director Ho turned to us and said, ‘I have just spoken to Premier Zhou Enlai. The performance he requires for tonight is the Xian Xinghai. He thanks you sincerely for your effort of the last twenty-four hours.’
There was the sound of a slow handclap from the woodwind section, and it was picked up by the cellists. Director Ho looked puzzled for a moment, fearing he was about to be jeered. Then the whole orchestra joined in the clapping and picked up the tempo and added syncopation. Ho himself began to clap, looking around nervously at first; and then he turned and seized my hand and presented me to the orchestra with a flourish. They roared with mock applause. He bowed to Conductor Li, who bowed back and allowed himself a smile, prompting another surge of applause; and then he pulled the orchestra leader from her seat and bowed with her; and then he raised his hands above his head to applaud the orchestra, and waved them vigorously to their feet to take a bow. ‘The Long March is over,’ Conductor Li shouted. ‘Long live the Long Marchers!’
Director Ho took me aside as the orchestra members stretched themselves and began to talk loudly and excitedly about the performance to come. ‘The talks have broken down,’ he said. ‘No communiqué and no agreement.’
*
That night – September 30th, 1959 – Premier Khrushchev and his party attended a banquet with Mao, Zhou, Liu and the others, and were then driven by limousine to the Great Hall of the People where they watched me, dressed in a tight-fitting chi pao the colour of the Chinese flag, as I performed Shostakovich’s violin concerto, masquerading as Xian Xinghai’s rediscovered programmatic work, The Liberation of Mudanjiang. Ho Luting, Director of the Shanghai Conservatory, announced the titles of each movement, declaiming them like an opera singer, and an interpreter relayed them into Khrushchev’s ear.
Just before we went on stage, Ho had taken my arm firmly. ‘I have every confidence in you. Tonight you bear all of China’s ambitions and griefs.’ Then his voice fell to a whisper: ‘And remember, the future of the Conservatory, perhaps even the future of music itself in our nation, depends . . .’ He was lost for words. ‘If we can serve the masses well tonight . . .’ I turned towards the stage and felt his hand push me gently forward.
I cannot be certain when it dawned on Premier Khrushchev that the music was not a piece composed by a Chinese composer about the liberation of a dusty railway junction from the Japanese occupiers. I was not watching him. I did not see if Andrei Gromyko or one of his aides tugged Khrushchev’s sleeve and whispered to him words that darkened his countenance. I suspect the subtlety of the gesture escaped them at first. It was hardly a well-known piece of music, having only had a handful of performances. But I suspect that they were unsettled by it. It is unsettling music, after all; angry and despairing, resolute and mocking. And I am sure that they did not remain ignorant of its true provenance for long.
Although I had played with orchestras before, I had never before felt such a sense of animal comfort at knowing there were others around me. These were my fellow musicians, some friends, some strangers to me, all of them now moving as one, beside and behind me, apart from me, and yet creating with me and through me, for this half hour, a thing that had never before existed (not, at least, in this precise form) and would never exist again, an accumulation of tiny movements – the abrasion of horsehair on taut strings, the vibration of reeds, the reverberation of waves of sound within chambers of brass and wood, the collision of hammers against stretched skin or wooden key – facts which together made a world.
For myself I was aware of many things, but none of them had to do with my audience. I was aware of the warm body of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume’s violin balanced on my collarbone. I felt that I was now a part of its particular history, its cargo of humanity, the people who had touched it, handled it, suffered for it, played it and listened to it being played. I was aware of Shostakovich’s hidden code; the repeated, niggling act of subterfuge buried deep within the music: D – E-flat – C – B, played straight through, played backwards, flipped upside down; a tattoo on the soul of the music. And as the drums and the brass and the basses – more deafening than I had ever experienced them, and faster, more urgent than in our rehearsals – launched us into the fanfare of the third movement, the passacaglia, I felt lifted off my feet and held aloft for a moment until it was my cue to begin to play, whereupon the long, flowing, angry notes that fell from my violin, that melody full of bile and disgust and triumph, returned me solidly to the stage. And I was aware – strangely aware – of my own physical being, of my muscles and bones and sinews and nerves, and of their connections and correspondences. I felt the ghost of a hand, Piroshka’s hand, like a fulcrum pressed against the base of my spine, from where I was pushing, pushing, insistently pushing.
*
After the concert there was a reception in one of the adjoining rooms. We were introduced to Khrushchev and his party again, and we balanced shallow glasses of Hungarian champagne on our fingertips and participated in the familiar grinning competition that such occasions inspire. Khrushchev shook my hand heartily, and clung on to it, resisting my attempts to take it back. Then I realised that there were two photographers fumbling with their flashbulbs, and he was waiting for them to shoot. The flares popped, and he called for silence, and began to speak in Russian. ‘You know, my dear comrades, that politicians love musicians most of all, for to a politician a musician is like a child. She is innocence itself. When she performs, when she bows to us, she becomes the child of everyone who listens to her. She becomes the living hope of Marxism, her talent owned collectively, owned by all of us.’
&n
bsp; A young man stepped forward, buttoning his jacket and clearing his throat as if he was about to sing, but Khrushchev held him back. ‘No, no, I will ask our young soloist – who was taught to speak Russian by the finest of teachers – to translate for me,’ he said. With a lump in my throat, I obliged, and he continued: ‘Now we can contrast musicians with writers.’ He shook his jowls like a rooster’s wattle and tutted under his breath. ‘Writers are another matter,’ he said. ‘Not at all like children, but like stern parents, pointing out our faults and wagging their fat fingers at us. Even a writer who is a young man sets himself up as a father to the people. Translate that, my dear,’ he said, and took small sips from his champagne as I did so.
‘That is why politicians fear writers,’ he continued, ‘and why we try to keep them on their guard. But you musicians, you are blessed, because you remind old men like me of our lost innocence and our unrealised dreams.’
After I had translated his words, Khrushchev called for another glass and held it aloft towards the chandelier. ‘A toast to the People’s Republic of China,’ he declared, ‘and to undying friendship with the Soviet Union!’ Around the room, from a hundred raised glasses of the swirling amber liquid, thousands of tiny points of light glistened.
The Phoenix Song Page 34