The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  Then Lu saw Mrs Chang come out of an alley across the street. She was carrying a string bag, had her head down and was walking directly towards the front door of the Tongfalong Store. Lu pressed some coins into the Russian’s palm and strode briskly towards Mrs Chang, careful not to break into a run. He caught up with her just as she stepped onto the footpath, and took her by the arm as if she were his mother. ‘We are betrayed, Auntie,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘There are agents everywhere.’ Mrs Chang looked at Lu crossly at first, and then nodded and kept walking beside him. ‘You must turn around immediately and go home,’ Lu said, ‘Mr Wang will know to leave the city if no one meets him. It is too dangerous even to talk to him. For all we know they may have followed you here.’

  Suddenly Mrs Chang stopped and grasped Lu’s sleeve. He looked up to find a man standing motionless on the footpath some twenty paces ahead of them. He had a battered suitcase in one hand, a thin coat unbuttoned, and a felt trilby pulled down over his ears. His eyes were hidden behind thick spectacles, but Lu could tell that he was looking directly at Mrs Chang. Lu felt Mrs Chang’s body tense and he took her hand in his and pulled her around and headed for the entrance to the store, leaving the man standing by himself. Mrs Chang came without argument, but they had only gone a few paces when there was a commotion of shouts and whistles behind them. Mrs Chang pulled her hand away and spun around. Lu looked over his shoulder to see the man running away from them, his hat flying backwards and falling to the pavement. An agent was running after him with a pistol raised above his head, and out of the corner of his eye Lu sensed other agents in the crowd homing in on the fleeing figure. He seized Mrs Chang around the shoulders and pulled her towards the door of the department store. They watched as another agent stepped in front of the man and tried to tackle him. The man seized the agent’s arm and swung him onto the road where he fell backwards hitting the side of a passing car and falling on his face on the cobblestones. Wang darted towards the entrance to the alleyway by which Lu had come, pushing the grinder from his barrow and seizing from his hand a pair of scissors he was grinding. But then he stumbled in front of the old melon-seed seller, and, scrambling to his feet, bent down to retrieve the scissors and then stepped back in alarm as the old man calmly produced a pistol from beneath his sack of seeds, steadied the long barrel on his left forearm and shot him once in the front of the thigh.

  The impact sent Mr Wang sprawling backwards onto the pavement clutching his leg, and making loud gasping shouts, ah-aah-aaah, as if he were about to sneeze. The agents fell onto him and pinned him to the ground. He raised his head and shouted in pain as blood gushed in rhythmic spurts from his thigh. Even from a distance Lu could tell that the bullet had passed through a major artery. One of the agents removed the fallen man’s belt and began to twist it around his bleeding thigh as a tourniquet.

  Mrs Chang went rigid in Lu’s arms. Her weight seemed to double as he dragged her into the rush of pedestrians fleeing the street into the Tongfalong Store. Inside the shopkeepers were peering out the narrow windows to see what was happening, and Lu was able to slip unnoticed through a storeroom into a back alley, keeping his arm firmly around Mrs Chang as they ran into the next street. They rested in a doorway while Lu checked that they were not being followed. Mrs Chang had not said a word all this time, but as Lu took her hand once more she turned her face up to him. Her eyes stared right through him. ‘He is my son,’ she said. ‘I have not seen him in ten years. He has been in exile in Paris.’ Her composure crumbled and she began to sob into her hands.

  Lu tried to comfort Mrs Chang. ‘There is nothing you can do,’ he said. ‘You must flee the city.’ She went very quiet as Lu took a slip of paper and a pencil stub and wrote down the directions to a safe house in Jingxing County. She looked at it and shook her head. ‘You leave the city,’ she said, as she picked up her string bag and made to go. ‘Don’t worry about me. I will go to my brother’s house and await news. Good luck.’

  Lu made his way slowly to the river, cutting through the warehouses of the cotton fluffing plant and travelling back streets and alleys rather than risking the main boulevards. When he reached the embankment he felt his heart lighten. The spring sun was warm and birds shuttled amongst the trees on the riverbank. Old people ambled along the promenade. A group of schoolchildren marched past, holding hands in pairs ahead of their teacher. For a while Lu was merely another citizen taking an afternoon stroll.

  He came to a solitary shed overhung by some dusty linden trees. It was here he had agreed to meet Lu Min and An Libai. From the angle of the sun he reckoned he had three hours to wait until dusk, so he crawled under the shed and went to sleep. When he awoke the sun had dipped lower in the sky, and he scouted along the riverbank looking for a boatman who would take three people across the river at dusk. They could have tried to cross the railway bridge, but Lu knew that it would be a foolhardy option. He found a young man – little more than a boy – who agreed to make the journey and they agreed on a price. Then he returned to the shed to wait.

  Darkness approached without any sign of Lu Min or An Libai. Lu could see the railway bridge in the distance, and could make out hurricane lamps moving along it and stopping at regular intervals. He heard his young boatman approach, calling out the name Lu had given him. Lu shushed him and told him he needed another half hour. ‘But soon it will be too dark to cross the river,’ the boy said, ‘unless you are happy for me to carry a lantern.’ Lu gave him a generous down payment and a cigarette, which the boy smoked in his cupped hands as he squatted by the shed.

  The half hour passed. The boy rose to his feet, cleared his throat and spat on the ground. ‘Time to go,’ he said, ‘or we wait until tomorrow.’ Lu knew he had no choice. He could only hope Lu Min and An Libai had decided to flee to the southwest.

  *

  My father’s narrative stopped again. We sat on the riverbank side by side, both of us hugging our knees to our chests. My father gazed into the water for several minutes, apparently mesmerised by its flow. Presently a steamboat with engines thrumming pushed its prow upstream, unzipping the marbled skin of the river to reveal a layer of troubled water beneath. Overhead a ribbon of birds hurtled northwards out onto the river, curled itself abruptly towards the east, then equally abruptly turned again to the north and skimmed across the water’s surface. My father retraced their flight path with his eyes several times. It seemed an age before he spoke again.

  ‘Those birds,’ he said finally, ‘you see how the leading bird flies wherever he wants, and another follows closely at each wingtip, and then another and another until there are a hundred or a thousand. It is a simple equation repeated many times over. That is how it must be for them, each following at the wing-tip of another and only the leader deciding where to go, otherwise it would be chaos, otherwise they would go nowhere and achieve nothing.’

  He was silent for another age, shuffling his feet from time to time, and once or twice he picked up a stone and tossed it in a gentle arc into the river. Then, unprompted, he resumed his story.

  ‘This is where the shed was, right here,’ he said, pointing to the cluster of linden trees behind us. ‘I boarded the boat right here and within half an hour I was on the other side of the river travelling through the fields in the direction of Qiqihar. When I looked back there were one or two fires burning out towards the east of the city. I never found out what caused them. If it was one of our cells putting up a fight then clearly no one survived.’

  ‘What happened to everyone in the story?’ I asked. ‘To poor Mrs Chang?’

  ‘She survived. She is still alive, I believe, although she is very old now.’

  ‘And your sister?’ I said. ‘Did you ever see her again?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ he replied. ‘But in this country people return from the land of the dead every day, do they not?’ He brushed a stray hair from my brow, studied my face for a moment and then looked away again.

  ‘And what about your comrades? Tan Yongshang? Feng Cea
n? An Libai? And Mr Wang?’

  ‘All dead,’ he said. ‘I arrived in Qiqihar and found a cell of the party still intact. The Binjiang Daily was running an article about the crushing of the Communist Party organisation in Harbin, with a photograph of Tan Yongshang, An Libai and Feng Cean being executed in a courtyard behind the police station.’

  ‘But not Mr Wang?’ I said. ‘Or should we call him Mr Chang?’

  ‘Not Mr Wang, whom we should call by his name, Chang Wei Li. You are very observant,’ he said, ‘And very persistent.’ He felt in his shirt pocket and produced a cigarette and a book of matches. When he had lit it he drew hard on the cigarette and held his lungful of smoky air for ten seconds at least before releasing it slowly in two dragon-columns from his nostrils. ‘Not Chang Wei Li,’ he said, ‘because he escaped from the hospital where they were treating him, and somehow made it to Qiqihar. One of the women found him sheltering in a warehouse on the edge of the town. He gave her instructions to find me and bring me to him at dusk, with food and clean bandages.’

  ‘So you went to help him?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I had heard nothing from the party network in Jilin, nor from the comrades in Changchun and Mukden. Not a whisper, complete silence. So I had to assume the worst. I first gave orders for the members of the cell to flee into the countryside and hide in the villages.’

  ‘And then you went to help him?’ I insisted.

  My father picked up a stone the size of a large egg, weighed it in the palm of his hand and then leaned back and threw it into the river. ‘I had no choice but to go to him,’ he said, ‘It was my duty. But I did not wait for dusk. I went immediately. And not with food or bandages. All I took with me was a pistol and two bullets.’

  My memory of the event stops at this point, like a scene that is held in the eye in the moments after a lamp is turned out. I can recall the burnished surface of the river flowing by, the rotations of birdsong from the trees behind us, and the imprint of my father’s fingers on my forehead where he had brushed away my hair. But of my father I remember nothing save an impression of his lean body, perched on a rock, in white featureless silhouette as if his image had been carefully cut from a photograph. The image stays with me still.

  ‘Do you understand?’ the silhouette says.

  I nod and say nothing.

  3. The Bolshoi Prospekt

  In the photograph a little girl, my mother, stands between the legs of a man and a woman, on floorboards that seem, because of the angle of the camera, to tilt towards us. She has large eyes, catchlit with silvery half-moons, which stare out at us, slightly crossed. Her straight black hair is pulled tightly into two bunches above her ears and tied with ribbons, and she wears a simple, cotton print dress. Her bare feet contrast with the pair of men’s shoes to her right – a smart design, but weary and splitting – in which are planted two trousered legs. An arm hangs down limply, with the palm turned out. The little girl is holding fiercely to the man’s index finger, as if she were a piece of string he had tied to it to remind him of something.

  To the child’s left are a pair of sturdy women’s shoes, whose black leather is cracking and discoloured at the toes and badly worn. The woman’s legs are covered in worsted stockings, with several tears sewn up with white thread so that they resemble the skeletons of small fish. She wears a thick black skirt and clasps her hands in front of her. The hands are beautiful: long, slender fingers, skin like dress fabric with gathers around the joints, nails pared in smooth arcs, shining with an olive sheen. The child has her arm around the woman’s right leg, holding on as firmly as she holds the man’s finger. With the tilting floor it seems that the girl would tumble forward into an abyss were it not for the weight of the two adults to whom she clings.

  *

  I now keep the photographs in a box under my bed, in the scarred leather album which arrived on my doorstep in a battered and sagging cardboard box in 1972, along with my mother’s papers and personal effects, addressed to a woman called Margot Waterstone, who, I realised after a moment's reflection, was me. I had been informed of my mother’s death by one of the diplomats who had dealt with my application to have her brought to New Zealand on compassionate grounds. ‘To live out the last months of her life,’ I assured them. ‘She has cancer,’ I explained, thinking that was all that needed to be said. But there were ‘challenges’ the diplomats had replied, meaning that New Zealand had no ambassador in China and still recognised the Nationalist regime in Taiwan as the legitimate government of the Chinese mainland. They would try their best; and after several months during which they assured me that representations were being made and channels explored, I received a letter telling me that, regrettably, the matter had been resolved by my mother’s death.

  At that time I had not seen the album for almost twenty years, not since 1955, when, on what was to be my last night in Harbin, it was my companion through a sleepless night in the apartment of Kasimir and Piroshka, the Russian Jewish musicians who had become my mother’s guardians when she was a few weeks old.

  *

  Piroshka had met me at the school gate, explaining only that my parents had been called away to Mukden suddenly on party business, and that I was to stay the night at her apartment before catching the train to Beijing and then Shanghai early the next morning. Together we walked to my house, packed up my suitcase and violin, and with darkness falling around us walked the three kilometres across the railway lines and up the hill to the apartment block in Razyezhaya Street in the Bolshoi Prospekt, stopping briefly at a blue-lanterned Muslim food stall to buy some dumplings.

  By the time we arrived at the apartment the neighbourhood committee was already out in the streets calling the eight o’clock curfew. My train was to depart at five the next morning, so we ate quickly and set about retiring early. Piroshka had made a mattress of blankets for me on the parlour floor next to the piano, just as she had done for me during the first seven years of my life, when the apartment was my home. The city around us fell silent and I went to sleep almost immediately, but sometime around midnight I was woken by a brush of cool air against my cheek. The floorboards in the apartment had shrunk long ago so that they let in frozen knives of air in the winter and in summer admitted tiny river flies that would circle the high ceilings at night as we tried to sleep, invisible to the eye but menacingly audible like distant enemy aircraft. I lay quietly for a few minutes with the black façade of the piano looming over me like a mausoleum, then got to my feet and stretched my arms above my head. A faint wash of moonlight seeped through the curtain and in its dull gleam I could just make out on the table before me the silver knobs on Kasimir’s camera. It was a rangefinder camera, an imitation Leica with a retractable lens and the name ‘Zorki’ engraved beside the eyepiece. He had brought it out of its box and placed it on the table to remind us in the morning to take one last photograph before I left.

  I felt my way to the small cabinet beneath the window, found matches in the top drawer and lit the paraffin lamp on the table. The camera’s shiny surfaces and facets glistened as if wet. Its narrow upper edge sprouted an outgrowth of silver dials and knobs and buttons which resembled gun-turrets on a tiny dreadnought. Indeed, for that reason it was known in the household as ‘Battleship Zorki’, and for several years it had been my job, when we went out to an afternoon concert or a weekend lunch, to fetch Battleship Zorki from its felt-lined box under the bed and, standing behind Kasimir, place its leather strap around his neck like a part of some ceremonial vestment.

  I removed the photograph album from its drawer, set it on the table next to the lamp and opened it. The pages were of a heavy black paper, the photographs themselves fixed at the edges with gum that crackled as the pages were turned. Beside each frame a legend was inscribed in spidery Cyrillic script with a silvery grey ink – dates and places and names, and sometimes an explanatory detail (‘the day the floods receded’, ‘casting of the breadcrumbs at Rosh Hashanah’). First were scenes from the St Petersburg days, p
osed black-and-white affairs – the couple in evening dress standing with other members of the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Kasimir holding up his violin by the neck like a captured rabbit, and Piroshka, cradling her oboe, wearing a lace-shouldered black velvet dress that made her look like an armchair fitted with antimacassars. In others Piroshka was holding her fingers poised above a piano keyboard as she gazed up in stern admiration at some barrel-chested singer or asthenic violinist whose signature would be scrawled in the bottom corner, along with some words of demure affection. Then the scene changed, for Kasimir and Piroshka had fled St Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution, and, with their eighteen-year-old son, Vitja, found refuge for a while in the town of Samara on the Volga, the home of the short-lived White Russian parliament. Then the White armies crumbled and they moved on to Irkutsk. ‘We were some fifty thousand exiles,’ I remember Piroshka telling me. ‘An entire city on the move; or at least an entire middle class. Watchmakers, attorneys, and haberdashers, stockbrokers, bookbinders, typesetters, gilders and silversmiths. There were some aristocrats, of course, and those with the means had their separate carriages – separate trains, even – equipped with silver samovars and with quarters for their maids and their cockaded footmen and for the boys who tended the Barbary falcons and the hunting dogs.’