The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  John Sinclair was born in England in 1962, and has lived in New Zealand since the age of seven. He studied literature at Otago University, is a graduate of Victoria University's creative writing masters programme, and has worked as a political speechwriter, a Treasury official, a roving public policy consultant and a yoga teacher. In 1995 he lived in Harbin, China, as a Visiting Fellow at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, courtesy of the Asia Foundation of New Zealand. He lives in Wellington with his wife and son. This is his first novel.

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  vuw.ac.nz/vup

  Copyright © John Sinclair 2012

  First published 2012

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair

  dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism

  or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part

  may be reproduced by any process without the

  permission of the publishers

  ISBN: 978-0-86473-825-7 (print)

  ISBN: 978-0-86473-874-5 (epub)

  ISBN: 978-0-86473-875-2 (mobi)

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Sinclair, John, 1962-

  The phoenix song / John Sinclair.

  ISBN 978-0-86473-825-7

  I. Title.

  NZ823.3—dc 23

  Ebook production 2012 by meBooks

  For Mai and Jack, and in memory of my father

  Phoenix – Feng-Huang

  The Chinese feng-huang has nothing to do with the phoenix of Egyptian and classical antiquity, apart from the fact that it too is mythological. It is mentioned in texts dating from as far back as the end of the second millennium BC; and in a commentary to the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’ (4th century BC), we are told that the phoenix (along with the female unicorn, and the five magic beings – the white tiger, the tortoise, the green dragon, the red bird and the dark warrior) is a sign that the land is being ruled by a just king. Confucius is referring to the lack of such signs from heaven when he complains that the phoenix appears no more; presumably because the government is bad, and there is no prospect of improvement.

  Chinese scholars consider it likely that the feng-huang was originally a god of the winds, as the written character is derived from the character for ‘wind’ (feng). Some think that the feng in the creature’s name refers to the male, and the huang to the female phoenix: and that together the two words symbolise sexual union.

  Wolfram Eberhard,

  The Times Dictionary of Chinese Symbols

  1. Door Mouth

  When I was eight years old I taught my father how to walk through walls. It was the autumn of 1950, the year of our nation’s first birthday, of my father’s first stroke, and the first of my two solo performances for Mao Zedong. So young, they said, of all three of us: a young nation with all of its sacrifices ahead, a young man afflicted with an old man’s disease, a young girl playing alone on the narrow stage of the unheated Palace Cinema in Harbin, in a circle of yellow light, while the Great Helmsman and his entourage sat somewhere in the darkness, their quilted coats unbuttoned, the flaps of their ushanka hats tied up, tendrils of mist seeping silently from mouths and nostrils. So young.

  I had not met my father until I was four years old; indeed neither of us had known of the other’s existence until, one day in August 1945, we were forced upon each another as father and daughter. And even then, during the ensuing four years of civil war, he was an infrequent visitor to the apartment where I lived with my mother and an elderly Jewish couple; so that whenever he walked through the door there was a moment of unease – a fraction of a second, no more – as when an actor steps on stage in a play and confronts the rest of the cast, and thinks:

  This is the man who is my father.

  This is the girl who is my daughter.

  Now, in the autumn of 1950, with the war ended and my father returning to civilian life, we had moved as a family into our own house, but that unease stayed with me. So to be linked to my father in this way, for it to be whispered amongst strangers and friends, behind hands, over tea cups, that we shared this precociousness, this gift for doing things before our time, gave me a feeling of such warmth and happiness that, for a while at least, it overcame the worry of my father’s illness and all that it meant for the times ahead.

  The stroke stalked my father around his office in the China Eastern Railway building for several days. That is how he imagined it when, months later, he began to describe his affliction in his journal. Like a ghost it patiently observed his routines, he wrote, biding its time as he thumbed through a pile of requisition orders, as he received visitors, issued instructions, and asked for quiet as he signed the day’s death warrants. It retreated into the shadows whenever Wen, his secretary, came in to replenish the tea in the battered metal flask; but then, late at night as my father unrolled the blueprints for the aircraft factory to be built on the edge of the city, it raised its shadowy talon over him and felled him swiftly before making its escape. It seemed like a mercury flare, he wrote, bursting behind his eyes or before him on the desk, he could not say exactly where, but it barely mattered, he concluded, for whatever the case he was blinded by some uncreated light. His head fell forward onto the desk and he felt the tissues of his brain go brittle, as if fused into shards of spun glass, or like saplings coated with hoar frost, tinkling tunelessly.

  He lay slumped forward amongst his day-books and papers for several hours. Wen, aware that the Mayor and General Secretary of the Provincial Commissariat had no respect for the night or for sleep, dared not disturb him, until, deep into the night, having summoned the courage to ask permission to go home to his family, he found my father pitched forward on his desk, his cheek affixed to the glass top in a paste of congealed ink and saliva, his eyes flickering and a low moan, punctuated by clicking noises, sounding from the back of his throat. Wen brought my father home on the back of a bicycle rickshaw, swaddled in blankets, confused and mumbling. There being at that time no streetlights beyond the main city thoroughfares, and the night being moonless and clouded, Wen had to steer the rickshaw by the light of a hurricane lamp held in one hand, struggling to keep the handlebars straight and to propel my father’s lolling weight around the corners and through the dark streets. As he pushed onwards a light rain began to fall, a welcome end to the summer drought and its dust storms, and so, when my mother and I opened the door to his urgent knocking and received our husband and father into our arms, Wen’s face and hands shone with a ghostly glow. Towards dawn as we slept the rain became a downpour, thundering on the roof, overflowing the gutters and drains, flooding the central courtyard and sending dark muscular rivulets snaking under the doors and across the stone floors of the house like the black roots of an enchanted tree.

  When he awoke my father found he had lost some strength on the left side of his body, and instead of cycling to work, as was his custom, he called for a car. My mother, who was a surgeon at the city’s hospital, dispatched messengers around the county and within an hour had conjured up the only neurologist left in Heilongjiang Province, a White Russian, long ago retired. A droshky, borrowed along with its horse and driver from a Jewish family, made the trip out to his dacha outside of the city and brought the elderly gentleman (dressed for the occasion in an ancient three-piece suit, fob-watch chained to his waist-coat, black felt Homburg perched atop his white head) to the China Eastern Railway building for the consultation.

  That night my father arrived home later than usual for our evening meal. The household was already eating: my mother and I, along with the Deputy Mayor’s father and his two small children, who occupied the adjacent quart
ers in our compound. My father greeted the old man respectfully, nodded to everyone else and sat down to the bowl of noodles my mother put before him. She had kept aside for him some strips of dried pork and some tree fungus and added these to his bowl. He took up his chopsticks and instead of lifting the bowl to his mouth he left it on the table and, imitating the children, leaned forward amongst the rising steam and slurped the ends of the noodles through pursed lips. My mother put down her bowl and watched him. The little girl stared at him and her brother smirked into his soup until his grandfather tapped him sharply on the hand and then bustled both children out into the courtyard, drawing the door closed after him.

  ‘He said it was probably just exhaustion,’ my father announced immediately, without looking up.

  ‘Do you take me for an idiot?’ my mother said, and she reached across the table and took hold of his elbow and squeezed it fiercely. I watched my parents exchange glances like little slaps. Then both turned to look at me, and I cast my eyes down to my empty bowl, waiting to be dismissed, but neither spoke. My mother released my father’s elbow and drew a long breath. ‘If that is his diagnosis, then let’s go to the mountains for a rest, all of us.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ my father responded, ‘when we have time.’ He smiled at my mother, but she turned away. ‘Sometime, for sure,’ he said once more, and then added, as a command rather than an appeal, ‘Try not to worry.’ He went on eating, and my mother watched him without saying any more, and everything seemed to have been decided.

  The next week my father acquired a stick to steady himself when walking, but despite this he continued to cycle to work each day, winding between potholes or swerving suddenly to avoid patches of dappled sunlight in the road. He bought a new bell with a cheerful trill in the key of D, and used it liberally as he creaked down the street whistling old revolutionary songs and passages of Brahms, his favourite composer, all of them transposed, thanks to the bell, into the key of D, or D-minor.

  At night he would return home, whistling ‘The East is Red’ to the citizenry as they walked home from the factories or sat on their stoops, and, whereas before he had said very little to us about his work, he now volunteered details about the tonnage of freight carried the previous month by the China Eastern Railway, the sterling achievements of the ball-bearing factory, the geological survey of the new oilfields in the north, or this year’s roll at the school for steel workers’ children in Mudanjiang.

  He did not go to the mountains for a rest; but after a week or so he began to talk in an offhand way about ‘my recent illness’, as if it were a mildly retarded sibling who had come to stay and needed the occasional small indulgence. My mother seemed happier at this show of candour, and would politely point out small adjustments he might wish to make to accommodate the newcomer.

  Then, after a month or so, my father’s eyes began to play tricks on him. For a moment, he reported, everything before him appeared to be frozen, flattened onto a membrane inches from his face, like the elements in a child’s painting – a house, a tree, a dog – with all sense of depth or perspective suddenly gone. The first few times it happened he flailed his hands in front of his face and cried out and grasped a wall or a desk to steady himself. But after a while he grew used to these attacks, enjoying them even, and trying his best to prolong them so that he could study the phenomenon more closely. Several times I saw him freeze and hold every muscle tightly in place, except for a smile that formed in the right corner of his mouth. Then after a few seconds he would relax his face and shoulders, turn to me and say, ‘Fascinating,’ and carry on what he was doing.

  One evening I returned from my music lesson, violin strapped to my back, to discover my father standing motionless by the front gate gripping his bicycle tightly by the handlebars. I asked him why he did not go in. ‘I have a little problem,’ he replied, motioning to me to relieve him of his bicycle and taking his walking stick from the carrier. ‘Our front door has disappeared.’ He waved his stick at the battered lintel. ‘See, someone has bricked over the door while we were out, and all that is left is a blank wall. Now who would have done that?’

  I rested his bicycle against the wall, and stood by the open door. ‘All you can see is a blank wall?’ I said, pointing to the opening. My father nodded. I hopped across the threshold on one leg and spun around to face him. My father tilted his head and looked towards me, but not directly at me. ‘Ah, just as I had hoped,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘And quite amazing! She jumps into the wall, and simply vanishes. Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, here I am!’ I said, and I stepped back through the doorway, pushing out my chest, unfurling one arm above me and raising my chin like the acrobats we had seen perform at Stalin Park. Just then, a cart passed by, loaded high with a dense knot of firewood and swaying with the progress of the donkey in harness. A peasant dressed in an oversized coat sat sideways amongst the firewood. ‘Bravo!’ he called out, clapping his hands with a dull whomping sound, and pulling his eyes and ruddy-brown cheeks into a leathery grin. The teeth were missing from one half of his lower jaw.

  My father was unmoved. Dust from the cart blew around his ankles and settled on his shoes. ‘What a trick!’ he said. ‘You sprang right out of the wall.’

  ‘And if I stand half in the doorway?’ I said, and I hopped on one leg across the threshold and extended first my hand and then my foot towards my father.

  ‘Astounding,’ my father said, turning his head on an angle. ‘The wall has an arm and a leg, and . . . it’s my daughter. Or at least, one half of my daughter. I think, like the great Lu Xun, that I will write all this down for the purposes of medical research.’

  ‘So is this a game?’ I said.

  ‘One would like to think so.’ My father shifted his weight again from his right leg to his walking cane, and back, and then looked down the street, which was empty except for an old woman out for a stroll, bent forward with hands clasped behind her back as if carrying her burden of years in an invisible sack. ‘You must help me then.’ He leaned towards me, twitching his eyebrow. ‘Will you teach me to walk through walls?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied, and returned the conspiratorial twitch of the eye.

  On several occasions we had played games like this, starting with some seemingly absurd task, ending in a lesson – a quotation from Lao Tzu or the Yellow Emperor or Karl Marx or Lu Xun, or a line of Tang poetry from the book he kept in a locked cabinet under the gramophone – which my father would flourish like an ancestral sword or a magician’s rabbit. I told my father to stand as close to the door as he could, so that I could reach out from my side and pull him through. I extended my arm across the threshold. ‘Take hold of my hand,’ I said. He did so, his skin warm and dry and his grasp uncomfortably tight, and it occurred to me in that moment that this was the first time I had physically touched my father, that in the five years since we first met we had spoken many times, had sat at the same table, had ridden together on a bicycle and in the back of a car, but had never touched skin to skin. I began to pull him towards the door. He took a step forward and was about to enter the doorway when he jerked back, twisting my wrist and almost unbalancing me.

  ‘I hurt you,’ my father said, straightening himself.

  ‘No, no, it doesn’t hurt,’ I replied, although the pain had burned my skin. I brought my other hand around and clasped his wrist. ‘Close your eyes,’ I said, and I edged his hand past the doorjamb. ‘Now open them, and tell me what you see.’

  ‘My elbow,’ he said, ‘. . . but then the rest of my arm . . . gone . . . into the wall.’

  ‘Your hand is safe on this side,’ I replied, and pulled on one of his fingers to demonstrate. Then without warning him I bent my knees and pushed back on my heels as hard as I could. My father’s body tensed and he pulled against my weight, and father and daughter formed an inverted triangle on the threshold, our strength counterbalanced for a moment before we relaxed and released our hands and stood facing each other on our respective side
s of the imagined wall.

  ‘Are you still there?’ he called. ‘If you are, stand away from the door. I will run at it so fast I can’t stop myself.’

  He retreated to the middle of the street, dropped his cane in the dust, and inhaling deeply through his nostrils clutched his fists to his torso, reminding me of a singer about to burst into song. He launched himself off his right foot, half running, half hopping towards the doorway, and then tripped over his feet and fell heavily against the door jamb, hitting it full force with his shoulder and his face. He crumpled in a heap at my feet, his jacket riding up over his shoulders and his shirt-tail escaping from his trousers.

  I knelt down to help him up, but he shouted, ‘Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!’ and hung there for a while, sucking in air through clenched teeth, clinging to the doorframe, his head below his hands, and blood seeping out between his fingers, tracing down his wrist onto the back of his neck and around onto his jaw. ‘I am through,’ he said. ‘I am on your side.’

  Slowly, he raised himself onto his knees, pulling himself hand over hand up the doorframe. He paused for breath, and let me prise his fingers from the jamb and clasp his right hand with both of mine. I pulled him to his feet and he stepped forward through the doorway, a shiny black string of blood clinging to his chin and his ruffled hair gleaming with drops of perspiration. As I released his hand I felt the slime of his blood on the palms of my hands and fingers, smooth and resinous, so that I felt I might be able to roll its substance into a ball between my fingertips. My father brushed the dust from his trousers and jacket, and then, pulling back his shoulders, he stepped out into the street once more, retrieved his cane and turned around to face me. ‘Aha,’ he said, ‘just as I thought.’ His tone of triumph, of vindication, puzzled me until I realised that the door had once more closed over for him, had become a wall again. He walked forward and stopped short, as before, but then reached out his bloodied hand and touched the doorframe. His face lit up, and he let out a triumphant ‘pah’, as if with that touch the thin membrane had curled itself away into nothingness, that the wall within his mind had become a doorway again. He walked through and placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and he shuffled off on his walking stick a few paces before stopping. I waited for him to announce the lesson, the maxim to be taken from what had just transpired; but he stood swaying slightly on his stick, and then without turning back said, ‘After we have eaten, Little Magou, you will explain to me the significance of today’s riddle. Take some time to consider it first.’