The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  ‘Yes,’ said Leon matter-of-factly. ‘One night only.’

  Ruan summoned a passing waiter and ordered red wine, ignoring my censorious glance. He closed the volume of Proust and placed his hands over it protectively, and then gave himself over to the music, barely acknowledging my presence for the next two hours as he breathlessly followed the movements of the hatted pianist. It was an odd performance. The man seemed not so much to play his instrument as to taunt it like a cat with a mouse. He would glare at the keyboard, stabbing at groups of keys with his fingers, rubbing his palms together as if to warm them, and waiting until the last moment to embark upon long phrases of melody which seemed then to be left hanging, whereupon he would feign a double-take as if to say to the piano, ‘Is that all you can do?’ From time to time he would get up from his seat and, repeatedly wiping his face with a cloth, would wander over to the drummer or the saxophone player and complement their solo turns with a shuffling dance to all points of the compass, jerking his arms up and down like a marionette. The audience hooted and clapped.

  During the final set Leon announced that he had to leave us for a short while to use the telephone. ‘So do you think our friend a fraud?’ I asked Ruan. ‘Has he told you anything useful or is he just making it up?’

  ‘Why would he?’ Ruan said.

  ‘For the pleasure of our company, perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps. Is our company that pleasant for him?’

  ‘It seems to be the case. What will you do next with this information?’

  ‘You are not permitted to ask such questions,’ Ruan said angrily, and then his face softened into a smile and he put his volume of Proust away in his pocket. ‘Let’s go. We owe this man nothing, and I have no authority to undertake espionage, other than a general obligation to keep my ears open.’ He took out some bank notes and placed them under a tumbler on the table. ‘If he has anything to offer us I’m sure he will be in touch.’

  The next morning an envelope was delivered to my lodgings, and as I collected it from the concierge the telephone on her desk rang. It was Ruan. ‘You’ll be interested to know I have done some research,’ he said. ‘Our friend claims he was attached to the New Zealand legation in Moscow, but it was closed down in 1950. There is no New Zealand representative in Moscow.’

  ‘That settles it then,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ Ruan said, and added, ‘I have not felt it necessary to inform my superiors about this.’

  I let the silence continue for ten or twenty seconds, listening to Ruan’s breathing on the line. ‘Very well,’ I said at last. ‘If that’s your judgement then I won’t inform my superiors either.’

  Ruan laughed softly. I rang off, and opened the envelope. Inside was a sketch folded neatly into quarters.

  *

  I still have the portrait Leon drew of Ruan and me, on a sheet of thick paper using a wedge of charcoal clutched awkwardly between his fingers and thumb. We are seated outside a café on a cobblestoned street, with the monstrous blancmange of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur looming over us. Ruan holds a book in one hand, upon whose spine one can just make out the word ‘fugitive’, and is coolly examining the cigarette in his other hand. I am leaning forward over a musical score, pencil stub in hand, but am gazing directly at the artist with an intensity that could be either anger or curiosity. Even after thirty years I cannot say which.

  *

  Winter arrived in Paris and, confined indoors at the embassy compound, I noticed how the talk amongst the diplomatic staff turned more to the strange political goings-on back home. It was clear that a split had developed amongst the Party leadership. The circle of comrades who traced their pedigree to the Long March and beyond, who had liberated China from the Japanese and fought off the Nationalists and their American backers, who had united the peasants and the military and the bourgeois and had summoned home a scattered generation of Chinese intellectuals from the four corners of the globe, that line of hardened revolutionaries my parents had seen atop Tiananmen in November 1949 had now split into several ‘lines’, like a piece of porcelain cracking under the strain of its years. Mao Zedong had disappeared from public view in November, shortly before his seventy-third birthday, and rumours abounded regarding his health and his whereabouts. In Beijing the Group of Five gained the ascendancy, led by Peng Zhen and Deng Xiao Ping, but their hold on power – in particular their power over the army – seemed tenuous, as if they were driving a truck whose steering column had come loose. Fissures appeared within our midst too, with a faction of incrementalists and a faction of revolutionaries contending within the embassy, shadowboxing in the corridors and doorways, trading insults and feints, concerning themselves not with the substance of any political argument, but with the nuances of each other’s language, of whether by the choice of a word or a phrase one could unequivocally announce one’s membership of one ‘line’ or another.

  Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, appeared in Shanghai, refusing to be drawn upon her husband’s whereabouts, and announcing confidently that a struggle was brewing over culture, that art and form were now the battleground, rather than politics and economics. ‘That sounds like a genteel form of combat,’ I commented to Ruan. ‘A war fought with pens and paper and musical instruments and calligraphy brushes.’ Ruan looked at me askance. ‘You of all people should know better than that,’ he said. ‘Snake poison may take days to kill you, but a poisonous ideology will do the job in minutes.’ As if to illustrate his point, Ruan told me that Madame Mao had appointed Yu Huiyong as Chairman of the Shanghai Cultural Revolutionary Committee. It was also rumoured that the Shanghai Conservatory would soon be closed down. That was all he could say for certain. There were other rumours, but they had been contradicted, and Ruan did not want to perpetuate them. I asked him what else he had heard, about the Party leadership, about Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao Ping, but he shook his head and said, ‘It is not for us to know, not yet, at least, and perhaps not ever. Surely you understand that by now.’

  It was not until July that Mao reappeared, first in Shanghai and then famously in Wuhan, where he jumped into the Yangtse River and swam with the current for two hours, lecturing his entourage of supporters and peasants on the finer points of collectivisation. ‘Just like in the Dumpling Baths incident,’ I suggested to Ruan, but he claimed never to have heard of it.

  Mao’s swim in the Yangtse, like my father’s in the Songhua, was a signal to those in the know that an elaborate series of traps was now primed and ready. In the weeks and months that followed, an old order was swept away. Ruan passed on to me the news from Shanghai as it came through. We learned that Ho Luting was humiliated by Yu Huiyong and imprisoned, that his wife and children were forced to criticise him, that one of his daughters committed suicide rather than take part. We learned that my friend Ling Ling had been exiled to a village in distant Gansu Province (where she would remain for more than a decade, forgotten, and forbidden from performing). We learned that the head of the department of piano, Fa Jilin, was beaten by her former students, and that the pianist Liu Shikun was sent to Taicheng Prison in Beijing. It would be years until all of the stories came out. Some never did, of course. I was pregnant with my twins before I learned what had happened to Tian Mei Yun, that he had gone home to Suzhou and gassed himself and his mother in their apartment.

  Later that year I was in Turin performing a series of concerts, and had just finished a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Romances in the concert hall when Ruan handed me a telegram from the embassy in Paris. I had been recalled to China, it said. Ruan told me that I was booked to travel that night from Turin to Vienna and then to Prague, where we would catch a plane.

  ‘We?’

  ‘I am to accompany you.’

  ‘I need a bodyguard, do I?’

  ‘I have been recalled too. No doubt Beijing has its reasons.’

  I felt Ruan searching my face for some kind of clue, of what I wasn’t sure. Nor was I sure what my face might be expressing. Apprehension? Resolut
ion? Indifference? I found myself closing my eyes and saying, with a sense of vertigo, ‘Can we not, for once, doubt Beijing’s reasons?’

  I kept my eyes closed, not wanting to see what Ruan’s face might be registering. I wanted only to hear his words, sensing that they alone, stripped of all other impressions, would tell me whether I could trust him.

  ‘It’s true, one can always consider the alternative,’ he said softly. ‘But you know as well as I do that we are encouraged to behave as if we had no choice. At some point in the past, perhaps so long ago we cannot remember exactly when, we have made a decision not to have choice.’

  ‘I don’t recall doing that,’ and I was about to add that, even if I had, I now wanted to reconsider. But I kept my thoughts to myself.

  ‘Very few of us do recall,’ Ruan said. ‘But what is the alternative for you, anyway? Surely you recognise your situation. You are not simply a musician. You are in very deep. You know things, you carry secrets, you have . . . intelligence that may be of interest to the West.’

  ‘What things?’ I opened my eyes and looked sharply at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I have read your file in full,’ he said. ‘I know what it was you were doing in Shanghai, and it is safe to assume that our hosts here know something of it too, and also our friends at the Soviet embassy. So if you throw yourself onto the mercy of the West they will want to know everything you know. And the Soviets will want to stop that happening, to shut you up.’

  ‘Why would they . . .’ I began, but certain truths about my life in Paris had begun to fall into place, like the tumblers in a lock.

  ‘Imagine that China – the China for which we struggle – is not so much a country,’ he said, ‘as a game played on a vast chess board, and that it is not limited to sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces, but involves a hundred million squares – two hundred million . . . so many they can hardly be counted – and millions upon millions of pieces, spread across every province, every corner of the Motherland and also across all of the continents: a chess game without borders. Here, as in Beijing or Shanghai or Harbin, there are games within larger games, in which the placement of each piece has its purpose and its significance, gives comfort to some and causes alarm to others. The players themselves are numerous and ever-changing, deploying their pieces for attack, for defence, for posturing, for threatening, and of course for sacrificing, and all for reasons that may become apparent immediately, or after another five moves, or ten, or a hundred, or remain hidden forever.’

  ‘And I am a pawn?’ I sighed. ‘Is that all you are telling me? What a cliché! As if I didn’t know that.’

  ‘No, no, you are not a pawn; it is me that is the pawn,’ Ruan said, tapping his chest. ‘You are something more powerful; you, I would say, are a knight, since you can do things no other piece can. You are uniquely gifted, but that makes you uniquely troublesome and uniquely vulnerable. Your abilities make you a magnet for others – they make you valuable, and also dangerous.’

  ‘And who are these players?’ I asked.

  ‘There are many players,’ he said. ‘Their number and identity changes all of the time. I don’t know who placed you here or who has permitted you to stay so long in Paris. Perhaps it was the work of several people, perhaps unknown to each other, or even enemies to each other, but sharing a common interest in placing you here.’

  ‘And now in recalling me.’

  ‘Perhaps, but remember you have been here six years; the game has changed and the players have changed. You don’t know who will be aided by your return, and who will be threatened, and what that will mean for you. You will have to find that out for yourself, if you can.’

  ‘And you too? You will find out why you have been recalled?’

  ‘That also is true. But let me say just one more thing, the only thing that one can say for sure about the players: that each of them is also a chess piece, is also in the game, is a part in the stratagems of others, knowingly or unknowingly. No one is outside of the game. That is the important thing to remember. Bring to mind the faces of our leaders, the members of the politburo. Do you not realise that each of them also stands alone upon his single foot of jade or bone, on a single square of black or white, vulnerable to attack from all points of the compass, and in particular from the blind-side attack of a knight?’

  ‘Of a knight such as me?’

  ‘A knight such as you.’

  ‘I find that hard to imagine.’

  ‘In that case it will not happen,’ Ruan said. ‘Those who survive do so by imagining. That is what I have always believed, but perhaps what I am telling you no longer applies. The reports from the Motherland make me fear that the rules have changed. Perhaps no stratagem can survive this new revolution that Madame Mao has called. All I can say is that if you fail to imagine yourself as having power, then you will be certain not to have it.’

  ‘So what should I do?’ I said. ‘What will you do?’

  I studied the glassy surface of Ruan’s eyes, searching for a passage through them into his thoughts, trying to make him betray himself. I could see nothing.

  ‘I will think,’ he said. ‘Think and strategise. My parents and my younger brother live in Chongqing, and because I am in the game it means they are too. So my advice to you is to think about your family, about your mother and what your actions may mean for her, your mother’ – and here he hesitated for a fraction of a second – ‘whose health is not good.’

  ‘What do you know about my mother’s health? Who told you? What have you heard?’

  Ruan held up his palm towards me to calm me. ‘Let me be completely frank,’ he said. ‘I was advised that, if you resisted the idea of returning home, I should tell you that your mother is unwell and needs you. That is all I know.’

  ‘So this may be a lie, a ruse to entice me back?’

  Ruan was silent for a while, and then pulled his face into his sweet half-smile and said, with a note of triumph, ‘See, you are already strategising. You are thinking like a player rather than a chess piece. You are already playing the game.’

  In that moment I sensed that the world had changed, although I did not know quite how. I became aware of the space around us, the noise of people moving in the auditorium, the currents of cool air, the dark vault above us. ‘I will think about my mother, then,’ I said.

  ‘Do,’ he said. ‘Our train leaves for Vienna at midnight, so we will go to the station immediately after the performance.’

  *

  My mind remained curiously restful in the hours before the concert. I thought briefly of my mother, but she soon faded from my mind. I returned to my hotel and packed my suitcase, and when we returned to the concert hall several hours later I stashed it alongside Ruan’s in my dressing room. The curtain rose and I watched from the wings as the orchestra marched its way through a Bruckner symphony. Ruan was waiting with me, as he always did, to see me safely onto the stage before taking his seat in the auditorium.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this afternoon,’ I said to him, without facing him.

  ‘You have? That’s good.’

  ‘And I have a proposal to make.’

  ‘A proposal?’

  ‘Quite literally.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘My proposal is that when we get to Prague we ask the ambassador there to marry us, before we set out for home.’

  ‘To marry us? You and me?’

  ‘Why not? There are times when a knight comes to realise that she needs a close ally, even if he is only a pawn. A knight and a pawn working together can be a strong combination.’

  ‘I’m not sure I quite understand you.’

  ‘You surprise me. I thought you would understand perfectly.’

  ‘That a knight needs a pawn? Yes, I can understand that – although the pawn might seem to have the greater need.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ I said, ‘the important thing is . . . it counts as a move in the game, an act of imagining,
a way of taking the initiative.’

  ‘I see. You are thinking that if we arrive home and announce that we are married then it would, at the very least, put some people off their stride.’

  ‘I’m sorry if this all seems . . . dispassionate and cold.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise for that. If only more marriages began that way.’

  ‘So you’ll consider it?’ I said. I turned to face him and took hold of the sleeve of his jacket, turning the buttons on his cuffs with my fingertips. His face was half in shadow, but I could see that he was blinking rapidly, making his own calculations, the nature of which was hidden from me, although frankly they were of no importance to me. ‘Don’t answer me now. I’ve got a performance to give. Wait until we’re on the train to Vienna. We can discuss it then.’ Very slowly I raised my hand to his cheek and touched his cool, damp skin. He took my fingers and drew them into his hands, and held them gently, but firmly, as I imagined he had held the sparrow.

  ‘When did this idea occur to you?’ he asked.

  ‘I just thought of it.’ I said. ‘This very moment, as I was putting my suitcase in the dressing room alongside yours.’

  ‘Well, I will consider your proposal,’ he said. ‘Very seriously, as it deserves.’

  ‘While I’m playing you can think it through,’ I said, and I opened the violin case on the table before me and lifted Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume into the half-light. ‘And now let me be alone for a while. I have a performance to think about. We’ll talk again on the train.’

  I turned away from him, and heard his footsteps withdraw into the corridor behind me. Bruckner rolled onward like a heavy sea, and I allowed it to carry my thoughts in its swell for another half hour, whereupon, after the business of applauding and bowing and standing and sitting was concluded, I was summoned to the stage. I looked out into the auditorium. It was a full house, I had been told, but the footlights illuminated only the front few rows, where Ruan sat in his customary seat surrounded by the Piedmontese intelligentsia, glistening in their tuxedos and furs like a fringe of foamy breakers tumbling onto the filigreed carpet from out of the dark sea of humanity behind them. I nodded to the conductor and raised my bow; Beethoven’s first Romance flowed steadily from my violin. After I had finished I bowed my head and felt the applause falling like a shower of rain upon my head, a light shower, it seemed to me, for some in the audience were clearly unsure if it was the done thing to applaud between two works that were, perhaps, of one piece.