In Kolya’s apartment we found a small revolver in an open drawer. Why he had not taken it I could not imagine; perhaps it was an oversight. Ling Ling reached out her hand towards it, but I hissed at her not to touch it. And in the apartment Fyodor and Ksenia shared, the room where I had spent an hour the previous day, I found by the open door a small pile of seventy-eight records in brown paper sleeves. I picked them up and looked through them. There were five of them, recordings of Jascha Heifetz playing with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I told Ling Ling to go back to her room to rouse Fan Hong and get dressed, and then I tucked the records under my arm and descended alone to the street.
Madame Huang met me at the entrance. ‘They are all gone,’ I told her, and she nodded and smiled.
‘We knew something was afoot late last night,’ she told me. ‘Our radio operators began to pick up a strange message going out from the Consulate to their people all around the country. Reports are coming in from all the provinces, and they all say the same thing, that overnight all five thousand Soviet technical advisors have packed their bags and are on their way home. It has been an impressive operation.’
‘Is this what we wanted?’
‘We should leave that question to others,’ she said. ‘I woke Director Ho to tell him and he seems satisfied, although I wouldn’t say he was happy. He did laugh at one thing, though. Do you know what the message was? The code words they sent out to all the Soviet advisors, to tell them to prepare to leave immediately?’
‘Tell me.’
She paused, took a breath and brought forth two words in Russian, and although she murdered them with her pronunciation, I could still make them out:
Pevchaya zhar-ptitsa.
The Phoenix is singing.
*
Three weeks later I was invited to return to Paris to study at the Conservatoire. I do not know who arranged it. Director Ho could not have done so by himself; not without Professor Yu’s agreement or an instruction from further up. Tian refused to speak to me. Several weeks previously he had received an invitation to study at the Moscow Conservatory, but he did not expect to hear any more about it. Ling Ling accompanied me to the airport and clung to my arm, crying quietly, as I sat in the waiting room for my flight to Delhi to be announced.
I was ready to leave. There was nothing to keep me in Shanghai, and no one to teach me. I privately mused on the fact that fate was drawing Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume’s violin back to its home town, with me as its passenger; that I would now be added to the cargo of souls it carried.
13. The Phoenix Sings
Memories of my childhood began to gather around me on the day before my fifty-fifth birthday, during the long drive home from the beach house at Castlepoint. They were tiny shards, enigmatic and unconnected – the clicking of my car indicator transformed into a song from my schooldays, a whiff of farm air bringing back to me the smell of newly pressed bean curd, tagging scrawled on a fence spelling out parts of my name in Cyrillic script on a concert poster, and the flanks of a certain hill becoming the gently curved gutter crown of the felt Homburg that Kasimir always wore. I had experienced this several times during the decades since I left China (in moments not claimed by my brood of children, or my husband’s manic schemes), and I had learned simply to endure the hours during which the past rained upon my head like a meteor shower, fragments of my parents’ lives, of my childhood, my youth, and my distant, abandoned career as a socialist musician and spy, the wandering jigsaw puzzle of something that was once a world, propelled through space by the inertia of its history.
In the course of my ascent of the Rimutaka Hill the muffler hose on my Toyota Crown came adrift, and as I turned off the motorway and climbed the final hill to Brooklyn my solid metal chariot was growling like a fat man gargling. The owner of the antique shop on the corner of my street looked up at me and waved as she brought in the wares she had arranged in front of her door. The lights changed to green, and the fat man roared as I leaned my weight against the steering wheel and gunned the engine long enough to pass the final rise, from where I could nurse the barge-like bulk of the vehicle around the last few corners with jerks and tugs on the tiller.
I arrived home, more weighed down by the silt of memory than by my small tightly packed suitcase, and began to climb the zig-zag path to my house on the Brooklyn ridge. During my month-long absence the wooden gate, whose white-painted slats had long ago become enmeshed in the adjacent hedge, had pulled away from the upright and now lay at an oblique angle, ancient screws dangling from rusted holes like little blackened larvae, revealing a pair of empty beer bottles, denuded of their labels, nestled amongst the twigs and leaf-litter beneath the hedge. The day was almost done and the path was dark and bosky, overhung by rhododendrons that had become ingrown and woody during years of self-rule. I emerged from their purple gloom into the evening light and stood between the two Canary Island palms that guard the entrance to my house, feeling protected by their squat symmetry, their tub-like trunks and explosion of sharp fronds. I turned to look out over the city that had been my home for a quarter of a century. It was the kind of evening that would have prompted my late husband to stand at our front door with his arms opened to the darkening sky and the spangle of city lights below it and pronounce theatrically, ‘Has earth anything to show more fair?’ He would repeat the question several times, changing where the stress fell, until satisfied he had subdued any contradictory voices that may have been lurking in the shrubbery.
I found myself admiring again the rounded belly of the inner harbour, the seemingly vertical stacks of houses on the western face of Mount Victoria, the sharp green edge of the ridgeline and then beyond it the layers of the distant mountains, their boundaries bleeding into one another like turquoise water stains, before merging eventually with the smooth lapis-coloured sky. I felt a surge of affection for the place in which the fragments of my life had settled and taken shape, like a nest of twigs deposited amongst rocks at the highest point of a now forgotten flood.
It had been a hot day, the hottest of the summer so far, and the evening air now pressed itself upon the city like a blanket of warm velvet, through which currents of cool air threaded like ribbons of liquid silk. Down the street a cluster of people sat around an open front door talking. I could hear the clink of a wine bottle, a man and a woman laughing, in turn and then in unison, basso profundo and mezzo soprano. A gust of wind arose from nowhere, like a sigh from the earth. It brushed the hillside, setting the treetops rustling like bridesmaids swirling their taffetas. The palm fronds above me clacked, bird-like, in response.
For a moment, in the sun’s angled light, the scene became curiously still, as if fixed by some photographic chemistry. Then in the midst of this tableau a plane leapt heavenward from behind Mount Victoria, its fuselage seeming, from this distance, incongruously long, as if it were a stage prop, of necessity disproportionate in size to its surrounding scenery, being drawn steadily upwards by some hidden pulley and ropes. The plane turned over the city and roared off towards the west, and when I turned my gaze back to the harbour the light was there, the light of the sun concentrated on a shiny surface, a windowpane perhaps, amidst the foliage on the upper slopes of Mount Victoria. It flared like burning magnesium, nine million miles of light gathered into a point and reflecting a pencil of brightness, like a patriot’s signal, across the vault of empty air above the city. I stood, my face and torso illuminated by this warm, yellow radiance, and my sense of distance, of perspective, was suspended momentarily. I saw the whole scene afresh as my father might have during one of his attacks: flat like a painted screen hanging from the sky just inches in front of my face, with the point of reflected light marking a tiny tear in the world’s tapestry, a passage into a space beyond, from which someone was shining a searchlight.
The moment passed, but I was now thinking of my father’s illness once more, and recalling our encounter with the front door, and the wetness of his blood on my hands after I had pulled hi
m through, and the gloom that descended upon him in the weeks that followed. This is what memory can do, indeed it is what we most fervently want it to do: to flatten the perspective of time, bring distant mountains to our doorstep, so that every tiny detail of the past can become present to us once more, engraved as it were on a granite surface before our eyes, so that we can marvel at it, marvel that we were part of it, press our palms to its cool hardness, lean our weight against its mass, run our fingertips along its grooves, or, if we wish, rub its lines as a keepsake onto a sheet of thin paper.
I sat down on the bulging skirt of root-mat that ringed one of the Canary Island palms and leaned back against its trunk, feeling rather like a sage reclining under a sacred tree in some high mountain grove. The next day, I realised, it would be thirty-eight years since my father died. He died on my seventeenth birthday.
The light was fading as I turned back to the house. I stepped onto the veranda and into the patterned glow cast from within through the coloured glass panels of the door. Fumbling with the keys, I finally managed to open the door, to be greeted by a tall, slightly stooped woman who moved forward, one knuckle pressed wetly into her eye socket, to place some keys on the table below the large mirror. I am presented with this changing portrait of myself whenever I return home, slightly older, dressed in the emotions of the hour, captured for a moment in a heavy gilt frame. To place a mirror facing the front door of your house is good feng shui, they say, as it prevents the entry of bad spirits, who, unwilling to look at their own reflections, mill around the threshold disconsolately and eventually move on to the next house in search of shelter. I am always expecting to catch a glimpse of the grim face of some banished soul in the doorway behind my shoulder, but the only face I ever see is my own.
I turned towards the bathroom, and on the middle panel of the door found a rural scene painted in voluptuous oils: a country church, a field of lavender in curving rows, a peasant in clogs and yellow straw hat driving a cow towards a copse of trees where other beasts lay dozing in deep shadow. It was a pastiche of something Leon and I had seen in Paris, when we lived anonymously in a quiet corner of Saint-Denis and took the metro into the city on quiet afternoons when admission to some galleries was half price. On the door above the picture, in blue and yellow, were the words Aix en Bains.
Inside the bathroom I was surprised to find an intricate jungle gym of handrails around the shower and the toilet, in stainless steel etched with non-slip cross-hatching. How did this stuff get here? Then I remembered the workmen who had arrived, barely a week before the end, to install it. ‘Tarzan of the Dunny’, Leon had called himself. At least they had not touched Leon’s decorations. The word Aix was still painted in a deep jungle green on the door of the medicine cabinet above the sink, and Bains in large orange letters on the wall above the bath.
Returning to the entrance I found a wad of letters on the table beneath the mirror, held together by a rubber band. I picked them up and began to thumb through them as I stepped towards the living room. And stopped. I rested my hand on the door frame and pulled myself through.
The photograph of Leon hung on the wall opposite, where my daughter had said she would put it before she returned to London. It was the one he liked best. A studio shot, head and shoulders, in monochrome to give it a timeless show-biz aristocracy look, chin resting upon his knuckles, an air of bemused self-confidence that everyone knows to be very far from the truth. He said his face reminded him of a large crumbling cheese; but as I approached it now, and as the light in the room began to dim, what I saw in it was a cliff by the seashore – loose, clay-like skin (in the original, tinged pinky red), fissures running diagonally across his forehead, nests of mossy hair perched on crags and ledges around the ears and neck, and fleshy buttresses beneath his chin separating gorges choked with a scree of distressed skin and tufts of looping grey hairs. On top of his head the hair retreated unevenly sideways and back into a wiry thicket, slanting upwards and to the right, like a juniper thrown about by windy blasts.
‘Simultaneously the eminence grise and the enfant terrible of the theatre world,’ the newspaper had said. Stepping nimbly from lighting director at the Opera in Paris to set designer at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and then returning home ‘with his Chinese wife and growing family’ to establish himself as a director, producer and eventually godfather to a theatrical generation, he was for the most part loved, but not without his rivals and detractors. Known for his generosity, especially to puckish young talent (from whom he selected Sascha, living with her for three years before returning to his wife as his health failed), but also for his temper, his irrationalities and his obsessions.
Yes, I thought when I read the piece: his irrationalities, his friable edges, and his inner core of hardness. The article concluded with the simple phrase, ‘after a short illness’.
I passed by the photograph and went to the kitchen, where I made myself a pot of Yellow Mountain Famous Tea and set it on the coffee table, along with one ceramic cup. I sat down facing the window and the view of the darkening harbour. I turned on the lamp by the couch and its stained-glass shade coloured the ceiling above me with a soft patchwork quilt of reds and blues. Streams of vapour rose like a dancer’s hands from the teapot.
Memory is a weight, but also an anchor. I recalled the puckish actresses, and also (discreetly omitted in the paper) the puckish actor, Perry, upon whom, for a period of several years, Leon bestowed roles he did not deserve and did not carry off. But these were also the years of our happiness – the children, the holidays camping by southern lakes, the opening night parties on our lawn, fuelled by ‘cuvées’ Leon created by pouring the contents of several half-full bottles into one, and by late night jazz standards played on the piano, with Leon producing our daughter’s violin and scraping out a rendition of ‘Oh, Shenandoah’, to which our guests would all sing ‘away, you rolling river’, after which we would make our bed on cushions pulled from the couch, with a child or two beside us, and other sleeping forms around us like a colony of seals wrapped up in newspapers and blankets and coats, my back nuzzled into Leon’s warmth, his arm over my side, lazily caressing my nipple between thumb and forefinger or, with his palm, cupping the new child within me.
A friend of Leon’s in Paris, a curator’s bagboy, had explained to me that sometimes a sculptor chips away incessantly at a piece of work until it slips beyond art and becomes unfinishable, and useless for anything except to instruct students. Such, I thought many times, was my husband.
He is everywhere; unfinished, and unfinishable.
*
I took up the pile of letters in order to break the spell of my reverie. The first was from my eldest daughter Miro, my dark jewel, now back in England with her fiancé and their children.
Are you all right now? she began. Silly question, I know; as if you could be all right, this soon after, but you know what I mean. Here are the photographs of Bella I promised you. Isn’t she fine? Rosa and Antonio are being very helpful with the children, and, as promised, we are keeping them on a short leash – only one rave per weekend! They are turning heads over here, you know – twins, hybrid vigour, androgynous good looks, and so on. I promise I will bundle them onto a plane soon and you will have them back before their term starts.
I studied the photographs she had enclosed, lingering on the composition of my new granddaughter’s face – a mat of dark hair, whispers of eyebrow, a tiny fluted nose, and wine-dark lips – and recognised, with a sudden moistening of my eyes, the outline of my own face from photographs more than fifty years old, photographs that I kept pressed between sheets of translucent paper in an album in my desk.
And now to the meat of this letter (although Miro is a vegetarian her letters always contain meat) . . . and she went on to explain the situation, aided by a clipping from a London newspaper. A dispute between Sotheby’s and the Chinese government, no less, over a rare violin which the Chinese claimed had been stolen from their embassy in Paris in 1965, and which
had resurfaced in the estate of a yachtsman in the Channel Islands. There was even some talk of the new Russian government claiming it, citing records that had it in the possession of the Romanovs. She had taken the liberty of registering my interest in it, she wrote. She knew I would not mind.
Colin thinks we should press our case. He’s away from dawn until about 8pm most days, and he’s travelling a lot, mostly to The Hague, so he thinks it will help me to have something to work on once the twins are back with you. He hates the thought of me vegetating around the flat with two children, doing coffee mornings and playgroups – he says that’s the slippery slope towards macramé(!) and other such horrors. He says he’ll help with the law if he can, but that I can handle the research side of things and the media. He even suggested you should fly over and be here in person! How things change!
Colin had put her in contact with one of the junior partners in his firm. And she had talked to a journalist friend, who thought it would make a great story, and was eager to interview me as soon as I returned from the beach house, in particular to ask me about the precise circumstances of the theft of the violin, and whether I had any insight into how it found its way to the Channel Islands. Sotheby’s were being tight-lipped – the public interest might increase the price at auction, but they wanted to avoid a protracted legal battle over provenance.
I recalled a previous conversation with Miro about my failure to capitalise on my history. ‘The whole field is opening up,’ she had said. ‘There are wild swans everywhere, calling out to each other from the mist, getting rich, being glorious.’ Enmeshed in my satisfying, ordinary life, I had demurred.
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