*
We were to leave for Shanghai by train the next day. Beijing was swelling with officials, generals, performers, and members of the Communist Youth League in preparation for the Tenth Anniversary parades. In the morning Premier Zhou sent to our hotel brief letters of thanks, in his own hand, addressed to Conductor Li, Director Ho and me. At the train station we were delayed for hours as carriage after carriage brought in sailors in white suits, gymnasts for the synchronised mass performance, and ethnic dance troupes in their rattling costumes. I scoured the morning’s newspaper looking for some mention of our performance, or some pained announcement of a split between China and its ‘big brother’. Nothing. I mentioned this to Director Ho and he shrugged his shoulders and said something about ‘doing our duty’.
‘Was our performance a failure, then?’ I persisted.
‘Every performance is a failure,’ he responded, with a gentle sneer. ‘Performers always make mistakes, and can always find things to improve.’
‘But what did we achieve?’ I said. ‘With our musical insult? Did we achieve anything?’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Be patient. We all have to learn patience. It is the most useful of emotions.’
I let out a loud sigh.
‘Don’t sigh! What I say is true,’ he said, taking me by the shoulder and fixing me with a gentle stare. ‘Here we are waiting patiently for a train; but it will come. I have worked since 1949 for the opportunity to use the Conservatory’s talents to serve the masses, and those opportunities have come. There is no end to the wisdom of patience. I am still being patient regarding things I did years ago, decades ago. I am being patient regarding things my father did, and his father before him.’
*
During my absence in Beijing the last of my belongings had been moved out of the Foreign Teachers’ Building to make way for Fan Hong, the young woman from Beijing who was to take over my spying duties in the wall of Raya’s apartment. I now had a room to myself in an apartment building nearby that housed mainly faculty members. It was a step up, but without Ling Ling and – I realised to my surprise – without my nightly encounter with Raya Vishinsky and her evening’s selection of guests, I felt cut adrift, alone, incomplete. I spoke immediately to Madame Huang, asking to return to my old lodgings and my former duties. She ignored me, and told me that Kirill, the defence attaché, had not been in Shanghai since the last conversation I had overheard. I persisted and she held up a flat palm in front of my face. ‘Be quiet!’ she said. Her eyes flashed at me and for once she was not smiling. ‘Do not challenge me! The decision is mine and it is made! Your work is done.’
Later that day I walked up to Comrade Meretrenko’s apartment for my usual lesson. It had been more than a month since I had last been there. Ksenia let me in.
‘Dobro pozhalovat,’ she said. ‘Welcome home. My husband says you have been away.’
Fyodor himself emerged from a bedroom. ‘They told me you were sick,’ he said, ‘but I never believed them.’ He smiled and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘And then yesterday I met Comrade Guan from the orchestra and she let slip the secret.’
‘The secret?’
‘You have been in Beijing with the orchestra, no? Second violins, still? Or have they promoted you?’
‘They have promoted me.’
‘And the occasion? I expect it had to do with the Tenth Anniversary.’
‘Yes, it did. We played a concert for Comrades Khrushchev and Gromyko.’
‘Indeed!’ Fyodor’s beetle-brows began to undulate. ‘Ksenia, did you hear that? A concert for our beloved Comrade from the Donetsk mines.’
Ksenia was twisting her hair into its bun, pushing clips into place and tucking in stray locks. ‘I heard it,’ she said, ‘and I must go now, Fyodor. Sasha is waiting for me.’
‘And did Comrade Khrushchev enjoy himself?’ Fyodor went on.
‘It was hard to tell.’
‘Yes, I can imagine. I say good luck to anyone who plays music for that man! He has tried all his life to be a hromadyanyn, as we say in the Ukraine. Neither a Russian, nor a Jew, nor a Pole; but a Ukrainian, a miner and before that a peasant. He is proudly uncultured, shall we say. In Ukraine we love him, of course. A man of our soil – no, a man of the mines, so technically he is a man of the rocks beneath the soil, the rocks that continually work their way to the surface and break our ploughs. He is a great, a great . . . sack of Ukrainian rocks.’
Ksenia scowled at him, and Fyodor turned to me again. ‘You won’t repeat that, will you?’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘To whom would I repeat it?’
‘I must go or I will be late,’ Ksenia said, and she stared at her husband for a moment, rearranged his shirt front, tweaked his chin and then slipped out the door and clicked it shut behind her.
Fyodor set a glass on the table and poured out two untidy dashes of vodka from a bottle. I had never seen him drink before, and certainly not during a lesson.
‘You might repeat it to your masters,’ he said, looking down at his hands.
He swirled the drink in his glass several times and then threw his head back and emptied the contents into his mouth. He put the glass back on the table and placed his hands on the top rail of a chair, kneading it anxiously.
I turned away from him, towards the window. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Do you know the girl who has been in your room while you were away?’ From behind my back I heard the clink of the vodka bottle once more, and then the rising metallic ‘doy-eeng’ as something hit the enamel water jug, two octaves in a split-second, prompting within me some involuntary mathematical speculation. ‘Miss Fan is her name. She is a recent arrival at the Conservatory. I have been watching her play in the ensembles. She is a viola player, and is also in the second erhus, I believe, in the traditional Chinese orchestra. It’s a travesty, don’t you think? The “traditional” Chinese orchestra? Twenty-four erhu players, a dozen pipa players, a phalanx of zithers, the line of reed players, the gongs and cymbals, all sitting bolt upright on their chairs with their music stands, the men strangled by their collars and the women poured into those tiny dresses, all eyes fixed on the conductor in his tuxedo. Whose tradition is that? What are they going to play? Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with Chinese characteristics? Now, that I would love to hear.’ He made a high-pitched nasal hum, rehearsing several bars of something slow and majestic.
‘Anyway,’ he sighed, ‘her playing is ordinary, talentless, and I think our efforts on her are wasted. It is a mystery why anyone thought she should be studying at a Conservatory.’
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ I said. ‘That your efforts should be wasted.’
Fyodor came to stand with me at the window, and he pulled aside the net curtain so that we could see better the empty courtyard below and a protruding roof with a beard of grass growing in the gutter.
‘She has had a cough, poor dear,’ Fyodor said. ‘We have all been hearing it up and down the stairs since she moved in. One of those asthmatic ones I suspect. Fluid in the lungs.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, too,’ I said, and I knew immediately what was coming next.
‘We heard it at Raya’s apartment the other night. Her cough, I mean. And it seemed so close it was like she was on the fire escape outside. Kolya poked his head out of the window and looked up and down the fire escape, but saw nothing. And then we heard the cough again.’
Fyodor released the net curtain and turned to face me.
‘We found the panel and the little listening post,’ he said. ‘Do you have anything you want to say? I suspect not.’
I said nothing, and after a while Fyodor went on, ‘For my part, I have something to say, and that is that it has been a pleasure teaching you, and I see no reason why we should not continue. However, I may not be the one making such decisions, you understand.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘And I do have something I want to say, to ask, in fact.’
‘W
hat is that?’
‘How is Pavel Gachev?’
‘What a curious thing to ask,’ he said. He took hold of the neck of the vodka bottle and made as if to pour another glass, but then stopped and placed it back on the table. There was a loaf of black bread on a plate, and he pressed one thumb into it, pulled off a corner piece and put it in his mouth. He chewed for a while, swallowed and licked his thumb. ‘He is in hospital in Kiev,’ Fyodor said. ‘He tried to shoot himself.’
‘Will he live?’ I said.
Fyodor screwed his mouth to one side. ‘He may, but I have nothing more to say about him,’ he said. ‘I have never respected him.’
‘He seemed . . .’
‘What?’
‘Unlucky.’
‘I know many things about him that you don’t,’ he said. ‘And I assure you he has no reason to complain about his luck. But come now, tell me. What did you play in Beijing for our Great Leader?’
‘We played Shostakovich.’
‘Really! Shostakovich? Comrade Guan said it was a Chinese piece.’
‘She was wrong. It was Shostakovich.’
‘I can’t imagine she would be confused. So clearly one of you is mistaken or lying.’
I gave him a shrug.
‘Let’s pass over that for today,’ he went on. ‘So what piece was it? A symphony, I imagine. That’s what you need for that sort of occasion, something triumphant, the seventh, perhaps – the Leningrad Symphony? No, not that one,’ and he pointed at me with his glass, propelling a spray of vodka onto the floor between us. ‘Not the seventh, but the tenth, surely! The symphony they are already calling “the Great Tenth”, the one . . . the one with the Ukrainian hopak dance in the finale . . .’
‘No, it was the violin concerto.’
Fyodor made a sharp sniffing noise. ‘The violin concerto? The Jewish one?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And, of course, you . . .’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘So, do you still want lessons from me? Now that you are both a modernist and a hero of socialism, is there any more I can teach you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You can teach me to play like Jascha Heifetz.’
Fyodor snorted. ‘I will try,’ he said. ‘So, play.’ He sat down heavily on the chair and watched as I put my violin case on the table and opened it. I felt his eyes on me as I tightened my bow, placed the violin under my chin and strummed the strings lightly with one fingertip to make sure they were in tune.
‘What is that?’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Show me that.’ He took the violin from my chin and held it up to the light from the window. ‘Where did you get this?’ he said. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘My mother gave it to me,’ I said.
‘Your mother! Rubbish! Where would a mother get a violin like this? It’s a Guarneri, isn’t it?’
‘Are you saying I am lying?’
‘You have lied before.’
‘Everybody has to lie sometimes. My mother brought it with her on her last visit. It was given to us several years ago in Harbin by David Oistrakh, when he was touring China with Sviatoslav Richter.’
‘You are mocking me.’
‘And Oistrakh got it from Dmitri Shostakovich,’ I said, raising my voice, ‘and he got it from the Grand Duke!’
Fyodor handed the violin back to me. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘What shall I play?’ I asked, placing the violin under my chin again.
Fyodor shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I said I don’t want to hear any more. I have lost my appetite for music today. Besides, I now see that when you play, there is so much more going on than just music, I no longer know what it is I am listening to.’
‘Again, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean these other things, these complications and histories and hidden codes and connections. This is what frightens me about modernism. Music is not just music when you play it. When you play, these other things come to life. That is what makes your playing so . . . full, so intimidating, so . . . magnificent, so intoxicating, so . . . toxic. Your playing is like vodka. Do you know that? Don’t laugh. I am not being funny. It’s like a good vodka. It has a land and a people behind it, whose lives and soil you can taste if you pay attention.’
‘I still don’t know what you mean.’
‘Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you are too young still, but understand just this: that playing like yours does not arise in a vacuum, it is not tied to one place and time, as is that of your colleagues here. There are two or three people in this institution that play as well as you. And back in Moscow, at the Conservatory there, I could produce a dozen more. Many of them are better technicians than you, and for that reason may have more success than you, but you . . . you . . .’
He came very close to me, and I could smell the alcohol faintly on his breath, but I knew he was not drunk. It was not the vodka speaking. ‘You are haunted,’ he said, in a whisper, close to my face. ‘I have felt it whenever you have played, and now I see it in my soul’s eye. You, standing there on the stage with your violin, in front of a shimmering curtain, and behind that curtain there is a great darkness, and in that darkness, what shadows are there? What ghosts behind your back? A great orchestra of the dead and the half-dead, that’s what I see, sitting to attention in a cavern of air that is cold, rich and damp, that is breathing you out into this world.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I found myself saying yet again; but I did know, I understood perfectly what he meant. I had felt that cold breath at my back. I felt it take shape, rouse itself, whenever I put Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume against my collar-bone and tightened my bow. In Heilongjiang we called it the Da Leng, the Great Cold that always returns to claim us, that is our natural state.
‘Perhaps it is best that you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that way you will be able to free yourself. Do not become like Pavel, for whom you seem to care so much. He could not escape his ghosts, because he knew too much about them. That was his mistake. In Russia one must learn to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, to eat without tasting, to touch without feeling. Don’t try to understand. For your own sake, don’t try. Or you will end up like Pavel.’
There was a noise behind us and we turned to find Ksenia at the door.
‘You are back early,’ Fyodor said, resuming his normal kindly gruffness. Ksenia stood in the doorway and did not come into the room.
‘I met Kolya on the street,’ she said, flicking her eyes between me and her husband. ‘There is a message. You must come to Kolya’s apartment, you must come now.’
‘We are not finished,’ Fyodor said. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘Now!’
‘I am not finished!’ He turned away from her, towards the table and the bottle of vodka and the bread on the plate.
She moved quickly to him, took his shoulder roughly in her hand and whispered loudly into his ear, almost kissing it, ‘Pevchaya zhar-ptitsa.’
Without another word or a glance they were both gone.
*
Late that night two trucks took all of the Russian advisors to the airport. The Soviet Consul himself was one of the drivers, and he deposited them and their luggage in the pitch dark by the runway and waited with them for several hours in silence until at first light an Ilyushin transport plane circled in from the ocean and dropped out of the sky. Ten minutes later it was airborne again.
Fan Hong heard nothing. As night fell she had crept up and down the stairwell a couple of times, as she had been instructed, and then descended the fire escape to her listening post. Raya did not seem to be home, and after half an hour paring her nails with a penknife and singing to herself Fan climbed back to the roof, and then made her way slowly to the ground floor, putting an ear to each door en route. There was not even a snore, and all the doors were shut. On the ground floor she spoke briefly to the concierge who lay in her tiny cot surrounded by mops and brooms, and then ascended the
stairs and retired to bed. It was Ling Ling who heard the noises, the truck engines gurgling at the front door, the rush of stockinged feet on the stairs, Kolya’s hushed voice calling to someone to hurry up. She came to my room in a panic, having run through the darkened streets in her night clothes. ‘They’re all gone,’ she said, and began to cry. ‘All the doors were open, and when I got down to the street they were loading the last suitcases into the trucks.’
We returned to the Foreign Teachers’ Building and looked through the abandoned rooms. They had taken most of their clothes and their musical instruments and treasured possessions, but everything else was still there. We walked through each apartment, recalling whose it had been; each room seemed like a stage-set, sparsely but significantly furnished, waiting for the actors to enter. We found plates on wall racks, and cutlery in piles tied with string; there were heavy winter coats hung on hooks; record players with their lids open; ornaments hanging askance on nails, and beside them bare nails or chips in the plaster where nails had been; there were bookshelves with rejected volumes leaning against each other like victims after a firing squad; there were piles of letters weighted down with bottles of vodka or champagne, and pots and plates bearing the remnants of food hastily and half-eaten.
In Raya’s apartment we found the samovar and the stuffed bird. The latter I examined closely for the first time, a long-legged specimen with marbled plumage on its slim back and a tapered, slightly upturned beak that was yellow around the nostrils but then black at the tip, as if it had been turned slowly over a flame. It was not my idea of what a mythical bird might look like. All of Raya’s records were gone, although she had left a record player, and in an open drawer I saw a jumble of chess pieces, and amongst them a shotgun cartridge.
On the dresser was a shallow tin which had once contained some sort of potted meat, and inside it lay an assembly of twisted cigarette bodies, the results, I surmised, of Raya’s normal manner of smoking, which I had often observed: taking two or three long puffs – during which all of her anxious or troubled thoughts would apparently flow into the cigarette, like passengers crowding onto a train – and then firmly pressing the body of the cigarette into an ashtray. Lying cheek by jowl in the tin, Raya’s cigarettes, maybe eight or nine barely smoked items, reminded me of the images one sees of train wrecks, carriages buckled and twisted, jammed into a railway culvert.
The Phoenix Song Page 35