In Irkutsk Vitja fell into a deep melancholy, disappearing for days to wander the shores of Lake Baikal, lamenting his abandoned studies and his lost friends, and dreading a future of stale obscurity amidst the retreating tide of Old Russia. There were arguments (muted since the family was lodging with relatives of an old friend), and then, as the Bolsheviks advanced on the city, a final parting on the railway station platform, three figures embracing each other violently as the second and then the third bell rang, muttering promises half in anger and hiding their tears from each other. Vitja loaded his parents’ battered trunk onto the train bound for China, kissed them on the hands and the cheeks, and turned away as their carriage departed. Then he ran to catch the westbound train. Four decades would pass before they saw each other again.
In Harbin, after Battleship Zorki came into Kasimir’s possession, the photographs in the album became more numerous and more candid: Piroshka sitting beside a great-coated rabbi in a droshky; my mother at age four or five in her best dress performing a curtsey in the foyer of the Opera House; Kasimir in a straw hat playing his violin to a group of picnickers reclining on cushions amidst the trees on Sun Island, mouths open from singing or laughing, while in the background two children and a small dog raid the food hamper.
For his first ten years in China, Kasimir led the first violins in the Harbin Symphony Orchestra and taught at the Harbin No. 1 Music School. He was short in stature, with a brown curly beard and china-blue eyes which, along with his nose and mouth, seemed to have settled into the lower half of his face, leaving a large expanse of bald forehead that was marked by three shallow creases running north to south. A mop of wispy hair stood on the apex of his head, and he would often run the fingers of one hand through it so that the strands stood dramatically on end like a line of tilting exclamation marks.
Kasimir was several years younger than his wife, and perhaps because of this was given to acts of virtuosity: reciting poetry or cracking jokes in French, Russian and Italian, mimicking voices and birdcalls, and humming the opening bars (and often much more) of any piece of music anyone could name. He appeared also to have done most of his ageing in his twenties, and thereafter hardly changed his appearance until his death at seventy-five. In photographs of the Harbin orchestra taken in the early 1920s one can instantly recognise the balding man with the long scrawny neck extending from his collar like a turtle’s from its shell. But to identify in the photographs the other orchestra members, those who still visited our apartment in the 1940s, I had to scoop the flesh from cheeks that had since sunk or erase hair that had since been lost or, in one case, remove an eye and two fingers lost to a beating by the Fascists in the 1930s.
The most arresting photographs were those of Piroshka posing by herself. Like many of the Russian women I knew when I was a child, she was shaped like a pigeon – a golubchik, as Kasimir called her and her women friends, glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was out of earshot – with slender muscular legs holding up a rounded, top-heavy torso. What distinguished her was her face, severe and forbidding like an actor in heavy stage-makeup, a fortress atop the rounded escarpment of her bosom, with brows like a high parapet, dark eyes sunk into their orbits like gun-emplacements, and an assembly of cheekbones, nose and chin like angled plates of welded metal. Her voice was loud, though not deep, and she had a habit of speaking in complete sentences, without hesitation and with perfect grammar and measure, her arguments often emphasised by effortless rhymes and assonances, so that everything she said sounded eerily scripted, like pronouncements over a loudspeaker. Indeed, none of the couple’s wide circle of acquaintances ever seemed quite at ease around her. She was an unshaded light, a magnesium flare they could not bear to look at face-on. Except, that is, for when she picked up her oboe to play, and the lines of her face would soften perceptively, and the company would breathe a quiet sigh and wait for her to begin. She would hold the instrument lightly in her long bony fingers and it would begin to dance around with the tempo of the music, slow circling adagios and vigorous flourishes during the faster passages, so that it seemed the instrument was leading and Piroshka merely holding on, submitting to something greater and softer than herself.
So too when she retreated to the kitchen to cook our evening meal her eyes would become bright and glassy as she examined the raw ingredients: mushrooms drying on threads over the stove, pickled turnips from glass jars on a high shelf, cabbages and potatoes summoned from the depths of a wooden bucket, a lump of salted fish. She would turn them in her fingers and make her selection as if they were jewels, and then murmur softly to the pots and, as the tempo of her work picked up, start to hum more loudly: chopping, pouring, crushing, the vigorous boiling in one pot playing against the gentle inspissations in another, the door of the tiny oven clanging open and shut. The meal would finally emerge from amidst this clatter and froth, with Piroshka delivering dishes to the table in a steaming fanfare, wiping stray locks of hair from her blushing forehead as aromatic vapours swirled around her clothing. Watching her on these occasions absorbed in her music or her work in the kitchen, I saw a crystalline quality, the unfolding of a luminous inner truth, in the harsh lines of her cheeks and eye-sockets, and at those moments I could imagine no one more beautiful than her.
Towards the end of the album were photographs from the 1950s in early colour emulsions that looked as if they had been touched up with watery paint. Many of those later images I remember taking myself, with Kasimir setting up the shot – usually an ensemble of their friends in winter furs, huddling together on a park bench on the esplanade or on the steps of the great ark-like synagogue on Artilleriskaya – while he barked commands to Piroshka, who assiduously turned the knobs and levers to their correct settings before seizing my hand and stretching my small fingers one by one into the correct places on the camera and stepping back to take her place amongst the group. Sometimes, at the last moment, my mother would arrive, dressed in her hospital clothes, fresh from her night shift, and the whole process would have to be repeated. And finally I would press my eye to the viewfinder, which split the scene into two halves which never quite matched, though I knew they were supposed to. ‘Don’t worry, and don’t touch anything,’ Kasimir would shout when I hesitated. ‘Except the shutter, of course,’ he would add. ‘Just breathe in,’ Piroshka would say. ‘Hold still and press,’ someone else would say. ‘Pay attention to your depth of field,’ another would say. ‘Obey the rule of thirds,’ someone would intone unhelpfully. I would tense my muscles until they began to shake and press the shutter out of desperation, merely to put an end to the ache in my fingers. Many of my early pictures were blurred as a result, but despite that they were faithfully put in the album and my skills called on again and again until I became more proficient. I remember thinking at the time how grown-up it was for me to record the lives of my elders, not as a child in their care, but as an outsider, one whose gaze gave them form and shape, holding them in the palms of my hands, making sure that not one of them was lost from the frame. Looking again at these images on that night it occurred to me that mine was the only reality that was affirmed by the photographs, even though I rarely featured in them. I was implied, rather than stated, but curiously that seemed the more permanent state of being. Undoubtedly my mind was occupied with the emotions of my imminent departure, but it seemed true nevertheless that everyone within the frame had the melancholy look of those being left behind at the platform of a train station. ‘Fare forward, traveller,’ they were saying, under their breaths.
As I studied the photographs in the lamplight I heard a purring noise from one of the two clocks that sat side by side on the mantelpiece. Both were family heirlooms and it was Kasimir’s that was making the noise, a squat, brass-knobbed, brass-footed affair whose innards produced a sonorous, introspective hum, a kind of musical indigestion, every hour. Beside it sat Piroshka’s clock, altogether more grand, a house-like structure in wood and beaten copper with two trapdoors above the face. The two clocks filled
the room with their soft ticking, sometimes in strict ordinary time – tick tick, tock tock, tick tick, tock tock – but for the most part in an ever-changing syncopation – ticka ticka tock ticka tock tick ticka tock. I had grown so used to this noise that it had become part of my experience of silence. I rose and stepped up onto the brick hearth by the mantelpiece and waited for a moment. Sure enough the trapdoors of Piroshka’s clock suddenly sprang open. In some distant past, gilded angels or stooped Germanic burghers had emerged from these doors to greet each other, but, as a result of some domestic disturbance during the July Putsch, I was told, all that now appeared were two matching metal levers which presented themselves, groped lewdly towards each other like crab-claws and then politely withdrew.
I turned around and surveyed the scene of my childhood from the slight elevation of the hearth. It seemed tiny, perhaps four metres square, and now I was leaving it. To my right was the door out into the landing and nailed to its back was the old mirror whose network of blind spots would spread a disconcerting lattice of black capillaries, a pox on vanity, across the face of anyone who peered into it. Beside the door was the curtained opening into the bedroom where Kasimir and Piroshka were sleeping, and next to it the piano, whose bulk filled one side of the room, so that one had to turn sideways at its far end to slip into the tiny kitchen. On the far wall the gramophone sat against a background of wallpaper, striped blue and green with a filigree of tiny roses – white for death, red for birth – winding in a helix like the interweaving motifs in a piece of music. Above the gramophone were three photographs in a descending diagonal: a daguerreotype of Piroshka’s parents on their wedding day set in a carved frame with chipped gold paint, a photograph of Kasimir and Piroshka with their son Vitja, then aged ten or eleven and dressed in a blue-trimmed sailor suit and hat, and a photograph, which I had seen in the parlours of several of their Jewish friends, of three rocks set amidst smooth ribbed torrents of black water which, upon closer examination, revealed itself as a face, the rocks being in fact the bulbous nose and slightly crossed eyes of a smiling middle-aged man (whose name I never learned) surrounded by a contiguous mass of beard, moustache and hair.
My earliest memories were of accompanying Piroshka on her daily shopping expeditions. She would seize my hand and walk along Razyezhaya Street with a brisk high-stepping action, leaning far back on her heels, her shoulders pulled back, her bosom pressed to the sky, as if life for her were nothing but the long ascent of an interminable hill. I would sometimes have to run to keep up. During these excursions we would pass the Jewish cemetery (and next to it the old synagogue with its honeycomb friezes), or the marble-fronted building that once housed the Higher Music School, or the former offices of one of the Russian-language newspapers, and she would relate to me another episode in the history of her second city, the grand and now faded Harbin of the 1920s. ‘We had fled the Venice of the North,’ Piroshka told me, ‘and came to the Paris of the East. At the time it didn’t seem a bad swap.’
At the railway station we would often pause for a moment in the arrivals hall and look up at the old map of Manchuria painted on the wall above the ticket office. Harbin, represented by the dome of St Sofia’s skirted by a cluster of houses, sat at the T-junction where the China Eastern Railway sent a spur to the south, and then carried on eastwards towards Vladivostok. Curving snakes’ skeletons linked us to Mukden and Jilin to the west, leaving vast areas of blank plaster dotted with a few smaller towns, each marked by a clump of houses with a copse of trees to one side. The names of all the cities and towns were painted in Cyrillic script, alongside of which Chinese characters had later been added.
Beneath the map a collection of old photographs showed the first train to arrive in Harbin, when the city comprised little more than rows of workers’ cottages made of rough-sawn timber, each with a number stencilled in large white letters on the side. Others showed the railway station under construction, and, on an elevated piece of land beyond the railway tracks and depots, the New Town, Novy Gorod, with its two-storeyed villas and smart apartment houses, its restaurants and baths, gentlemen’s clubs and the Cathedral of St Sofia.
‘We found this Russian garden growing on Chinese soil,’ Piroskha explained. The boulevards were lined with linden trees and the horse-drawn droshkies of the wealthy clattered and swung around the cobblestoned shopping district. The hotels and restaurants bore the same French names that were then fashionable in St Petersburg and Moscow – Bel-Etage, Café de la Paix, le Véry. Barges and small craft plied the river, and lovers strolled along the promenade between May and September, when the temperature rose above freezing.
She explained how she and Kasimir had disembarked late on a winter’s night so cold the temperature could not be measured. They had walked with their luggage past a dark mass of men sitting sullenly atop travel chests on the platform amidst a miasma of cigarette smoke and body steam, eyeing the newcomers with silent contempt. These, they were later told, were left-wing émigrés exiled over the years to the island of Sakhalin off the far eastern coast of Siberia and now making the return journey to take up arms for the Bolsheviks.
Inside the station the news spread quickly that there was no accommodation to be had in the city. The floor of the arrivals hall was filling up with families arranging trunks and pigskin suitcases as makeshift mattresses for sleeping children and laying piles of coats and blankets on the hard tiles. Piroshka showed me the niche behind a stone pillar where she and Kasimir waited out the long hours until daylight.
The following morning they were awakened by the discordant trilling of a military band warming up. A crush of people pushed through the doors from the arrivals hall onto the platform, swaying and over-balancing like a field of ripened wheat. They jostled the players who were installed on the edge of the platform, and were waved back by the band leader who brandished a quivering baton like a fencing foil. Then with a blast of steam and clanging bells a train pulled into the station, soldiers swinging from the sides of the boiler and the flags of Tsarist Russia streaming from poles stuck into crevices in the engine and lodged in the windows of the front carriages. Four soldiers leapt from the first carriage and cleared a space with their rifle butts. Then the doorway behind them darkened, the conductor’s baton flinched and the band sputtered into the first bars of a jaunty anthem. A short, stocky man appeared on the top step of the carriage. He was dressed in black knee-length boots, a simple military tunic with a thin collar, and a flat cap with a shiny medallion bearing the double-eagle emblem of Imperial Russia. His face was round, his skin dark, and an oily black pennant moustache dangled from his thin nose. Cheers of Zhivio! echoed around the hall.
‘Who is he?’ Piroshka whispered into the ear of the man next to her.
‘That,’ the man said, leaning his head towards her, ‘is Ataman Grigorii Mikhailovic Semenov, the hope of White Russia, and the man behind him is Baron Ungern-Sternberg, who served with him in the Carpathians.’
Piroshka now noticed in the shadows behind Ataman Semenov a thin man with a head the shape of an inverted pear and a closely-cropped V-shaped beard. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses had slipped down his long nose, and, like Semenov, he was kitted out in a starched uniform. As soon as the band finished its piece, and without waiting for the noise of the applause to die down, Semenov began to speak. His theme was the ancient and venerable brotherhood of Rus, the vile scourge of Bolshevism, the tragic exile of the Tsar, the desecration of the Mother Church, and the perversion of the peasantry and the peaceful way of life of the Russian countryside. Someone behind Piroshka burst into melodramatic sobs, and a woman in an embroidered sarafan attempted to push past the soldiers, holding aloft a silver plate with several small loaves of black bread and a pile of salt. She was thrust back into the crowd, shouting repeatedly over her shoulder, God save the Tsar! And God preserve you, Ataman Semenov! She stumbled in front of Piroshka and her plate fell to the platform, scattering the bread and salt at her feet.
Semenov stopped mid-sentence
, dropped his head and clutched the hand-rail beside him as if he were about to faint. He roused himself and began once more, his voice now exploring the full register of the human larynx, from a whisper to a low operatic growl to a full-throated shout, now tearful, now vituperative and righteous, his sentences explosions of sound, of fury, pathos, and outrage, carrying through the hall and out into the street, and then finally a strangled cry of despair, his fist clenched in anger, rising to a shriek as he swore an oath on his mother’s blood that with these two Russian eyes he would witness the Romanovs borne on the shoulders of loyal countrymen, trampling the bodies of the Red enemy in the streets of Moscow’s holy city. With one voice the crowd roared, flags and banners snapped overhead, the band launched into another tune, and Semenov and his lieutenant descended quickly from the train to be propelled by a wedge of soldiers, like the charge in an artillery shell, through the crowd to a waiting carriage in the street outside.
Piroshka lost Kasimir in the crush and was sucked out of the station by the mass of bodies and dumped in the gutter. ‘To St Sofia’s!’ a soldier shouted to the crowd from the roof of the carriage. ‘Follow us to St Sofia’s for the blessing of the Metropolitan!’ She picked herself up and made her way back to their niche by the pillar.
Piroshka reserved her bitterest language for Ataman Grigorii Mikhailovic Semenov and Baron Ungern-Sternberg. Bandits, opportunists and thugs, she called them. Fools and strutting peacocks, Kasimir would add, at first without looking up from his newspaper, but then it seemed that the very thought of Semenov and Ungern-Sternberg unnerved him so much that he had to put aside the paper, rise to his feet and roam around the apartment for a while, flicking dust from shelves or rearranging books and papers, all the while repeating to himself under his breath foul epithets for the pair. For the next month Semenov and Ungern-Sternberg had occupied a suite at the Hotel Moderne, dining with displaced aristocrats, bankers and intellectuals, plotting the overthrow of the Bolshevik state. Meanwhile, outside in the streets and tea-houses, the talk of the city was how to finance an invasion, what route the armies should take, and which allies could be trusted.
The Phoenix Song Page 5
