The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  ‘And finally,’ Li continued, ‘there are still a hundred thousand Japanese civilians and perhaps twenty thousand Russians in the city. Confine them to their neighbourhoods, and then we need to decide what to do with them. We hand over the Russians to the Red Army once they arrive. As for the Japanese, I am told we will be dealing with the Americans, who will be governing Japan from now on.’

  Li rose and summoned a young man whom he sent to find a pair of shoes to fit my father. My father stood too, and brushed the dust from his clothes.

  ‘Comrade Li,’ he said, ‘I have one question. The party printing press, the one that was in the dacha outside the city. Do you know what happened to it, and to the cell that ran it? That was the cell I belonged to.’

  Li screwed up his face. ‘I think it was uncovered several years ago. The printing press was smashed. As for the members of the cell, if they didn’t end up in prison with you, I would assume they are dead. But ask old Mrs Chang. She has been in the city throughout the occupation and may know more.’

  *

  One day in November of 1945 I was in the entrance hall to the apartment, under the charge of Wang Taitai, creating something with twigs on the stone floor. A shadow was cast over my tiny edifice, and I looked up to see a man standing beyond the glass door watching me. Through the panels of imperfect glass he looked like a mosaic of tiles that had not been properly aligned, and then, as he moved closer to the door, a bubble in the glass gave him a bulge on his cheek, as if he were suffering a massive toothache or a boil. The man stepped inside and crouched beside me. ‘Is this the house of Doctor Xiao? Does Doctor Xiao live here?’ he asked as he examined my house of sticks.

  ‘This is a house of sticks,’ I answered. ‘Nobody lives in a house of sticks.’

  ‘In this building, then,’ he said. ‘Does Doctor Xiao live in this building?’

  ‘Yes, but Doctor Xiao is at the hospital with the other doctors.’

  ‘Do you know when she will return?’ the man asked.

  ‘Doctor Xiao is not here,’ I repeated.

  ‘What is your name?’ he said.

  ‘I am Xiao Magou.’

  ‘And everyone calls you Little Xiao, do they? Xiao Xiao.’

  ‘Yes, they do, and they always laugh.’

  ‘So, Little Xiao, Doctor Xiao must be your mother, then?’ I looked back at my twigs for a while, rearranging some that would not sit properly. ‘Is Doctor Xiao your mother?’ the man repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she is my mother.’

  ‘And your father? Where is he?’ the man asked.

  I made no reply.

  The man crouched by me for several minutes. The sun emerged from behind a cloud and I found myself in a pool of darkness formed by the man’s shadow, while the floor around me was brightly lit.

  ‘I don’t have a father,’ I said. ‘Only a mother, an auntie and an uncle.’

  I could hear the man’s breathing, and see his hand resting upon his knee. He was wearing thin cotton trousers, no socks, and canvas slippers with stitching that was coming loose and brown stains on the uppers. He reached down and picked up some twigs, and bent them into a small frame which he sat on top of my building.

  ‘Shall we build a roof for your house?’ he said, and together we stacked more twigs against the four sides of the frame until the roof was complete. When we were done he leaned back to examine our work. I kept my eyes down. And then, with a quick scrape of his canvas soles on the floor, he was gone. The door swung shut behind him, and our twig building was illuminated in dancing slivers of refracted sunlight.

  *

  I have no memory of a tearful reunion between my mother and my father, or of a ceremony of introduction where he and I shook hands like the representatives of a large kingdom and its tiny new colony. There was no formal agreement that hereafter we would be father and daughter. Instead, he started to appear at meals from time to time, bringing gifts of food, and he and my mother would go out for walks, despite the onset of winter. It would be another four years before the three of us moved into a house together and became a family.

  I liked him well enough, as did Kasimir and Piroshka. They had set aside their scruples about communists for the time being, and were especially grateful after my father arranged a holiday for the three of us. I was woken by my mother before dawn one day, and told that I was going with Kasimir and Piroshka to live in the countryside for a while. My belongings were packed into a small suitcase, and I carried my violin in its case.

  We took a train south for several hours, and then drew into a small village with muddy streets, sagging houses and a pair of dogs that ran at full tilt alongside the train as it pulled to a halt, and, as we disembarked with our bags, exploded like little bombs full of high pitched barking. A man with a horse-drawn cart was there to meet us, and he took us to our quarters in a group of houses built around a courtyard with a large dusty cypress tree at one end and at the other several wooden frames over which hung long skeins of cloth dyed in bright reds and blues and yellows.

  We had a single room above the village store, and could look down on one side to the street and the houses opposite and the fields beyond, and on the other to the courtyard and the grass-tufted roof of the storekeeper’s quarters and, further away, two swaying plane trees that hid from our view the simple flagstone platform where the train stopped.

  For the first few days we kept to our room, and only occasionally ventured down the external staircase to the storeroom at the back of the shop, where the storekeeper served us our meals on a small card-table. We would sit on three wicker stools amidst sacks of rice and potatoes and dusty brown bottles of sulphuric acid and kerosene, and each time a bowl or a cup was placed on the table by the storekeeper’s wife the legs of the table would sag and squeak at the hinges and sway so that we all had to keep one hand on the table top to steady it, as if we were holding a séance along with our meal.

  After a week Kasimir and Piroshka took to spending the daylight hours sitting in the shade in the courtyard while I played amongst broken, nail-infested frames and barrels of old creosote. Occasionally I ventured into the store itself where the storekeeper would look at me sternly and sit me down on a stool behind the leather-topped bench which divided his customers from the shelves of dry goods and the boxes of candles. When there was no one in the shop the storekeeper would ask me questions about our life in the city, and about ‘the Russians’, indicating the room upstairs with a lift of his head. Sometimes he would summon me to the locked medicine cabinet whose few lonely bottles were multiplied in its mirrored back panel, and he would bring out one of these bottles – of quinine or valerian drops or sleeping draughts – and ask me to translate the Japanese or Russian instructions printed on their sides. I answered as best I could, and then he would order me back to my stool and return to measuring out rice or dried beans, which would tumble with a harsh grating sound into the four-cornered tin cradle of the scales. This enormous gold-painted tombstone of metal dominated the leather-topped bench and its single eye would leer at me before embarking on its slow numerical ascent as the cradle was filled, its wandering eyeball progressing in a right-tending arc, fixing a malevolent gaze in turn on the candles, the dried fish, the preserved eggs, the brown wrapping paper, the dried chillies, the jars of Condy’s fluid, and the medicine cabinet, and then, the moment the storekeeper suddenly lifted the cradle from its metal hand, rushing back to where it started and, with a malicious judder, fixing itself once more upon the fearful child sitting upright on the stool in the corner.

  In time I ventured beyond the store and began to explore the village itself and to play with the local children, who spoke with a strong whirring accent and never seemed to wash their faces or hands or change their clothes. Soon I was roaming freely along the lanes between the fields of wheat and soy and down to the river, which was reduced in summer to an undulating field of gravel along which a trickle of water slipped quietly and invisibly. After a month or so we were moved into a sm
all hut by this river, a hut which the storekeeper had fitted out for us with straw mattresses and our card-table and stools, and for the remainder of our stay Kasimir and Piroshka sat in the shade of the adjacent gingko tree, swept out our two rooms, and cooked simple meals of steamed bread, noodles and vegetables. Every night I would practice the violin, playing my favourite tunes from memory (in our haste we had left behind all of our music) or new tunes hummed to me by Kasimir, and the people of the village would gather around our small hut to listen to me standing beneath the drying frame playing melodies from Beethoven or Brahms, the children climbing into the branches of the gingko tree and sitting there like oversized fruit.

  The village chief asked Piroshka if I would play at the mid-autumn festival. He arranged for the villagers to sit in rows on forms borrowed from the school house and set out in the village square. During the first piece the villagers came and went, talking to each other, eating moon cakes and shouting at their children. It was very distracting, but I persevered to the end of the piece. When I finished I waited for them to applaud. There was silence; or rather, a continuation of the domestic hurly-burly. I snorted with anger, and Piroshka rose to her feet and started to clap loudly. The village chief followed suit, and waved to the villagers to applaud.

  I started the second piece, but at a pause they burst into applause. I stamped my foot, and shouted that they should wait until I had finished. It was no use. At the next pause they applauded again. I stopped and they stopped. I started and they began to applaud again. I raged once more, and stormed out and ran down to the river bank. Piroshka found me there half an hour later and sat with me, and we threw handfuls of gravel into the shallow stream.

  ‘Don’t think badly of these people,’ she said. ‘They are innocents, they lack the culture even to conceal their confusion. I have encountered much worse audiences, audiences that were better dressed and knew when to applaud, but understood little else.’

  We walked hand in hand back to the hut, and stopped at the door and looked up at the gingko tree, which had grown dark within itself against the still-bright evening sky. Piroshka seemed to read my mind. ‘Would you like to climb it?’ she said softly. ‘If I were a child again that’s what I’d want to do. Why don’t you go and sit up in the branches for a while?’ I let go of her hand and stepped into the tree’s shadowy interior, and it seemed to extend a limb down to me. Piroshka was behind me again, and she seized me by the armpits and hoisted me up to where I could get my foot onto the low branch. I made my way forward on all fours, allowing the tree to draw me into its midst. I turned around and found that Piroshka had gone inside the hut and left me.

  I sat in the tree while the village around me sank into a silvery darkness. The moon was up, and I could see approaching from the south a solid front of cloud topped by billows that glowed in its light. I heard the rain before I saw it, heavy drops hitting the high leaves, like the sound of several people clicking their fingers at once. A cool gust swept through the branches and within a minute the noise of the rain was roaring around me and I could see the volleys of raindrops bouncing off roofs and hear the villagers calling to each other to close window shutters and doors. Then, another few minutes, and the rain was gone, and so too the wind, and the village fell silent. From my vantage point I could see the roofs and gravel streets shining white with moonwater, and I could hear the trickling of the runoff as it made its way by dozens of small rivulets down towards the river. I had watched it all happen without it happening to me. A dog bayed somewhere and then stopped. I closed my eyes and listened as the leaves around me began to shed their drops with a pocking sound, first to my left, then my right, behind, and before me. An irregular pattern, an attempt at music. When I opened my eyes Piroshka was waiting silently for me at the foot of the tree. She had brought a small, black umbrella, which she twirled jauntily behind her head as she watched me descend and held out her hand to take mine.

  I learned some years afterwards that our sojourn in the countryside had been arranged by my father to prevent Kasimir and Piroshka from being repatriated to the Soviet Union. He got wind of Red Army plans to round up Harbin’s remaining White Russians and move them to work camps, and quickly reactivated an old safe-house near the border with Korea. My mother, exhausted from sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital, suggested that I accompany Kasimir and Piroshka.

  All talk of repatriation ended once the civil war with the Nationalists began in earnest in 1946, and the Chinese Communist Party in Harbin fell out with the Soviet Army. My father sent word that it was safe to return, and we assembled by the railway track and hailed the next train. We were surprised to find that the train was carrying a dozen American soldiers, wedged in amongst units from a battalion of communist troops. The Americans were fascinating creatures, hard muscles under tight uniforms, all smiles, laughter and chewing gum. One of them tried to speak to me, pointing to my violin case and indicating that I should play for them. I refused, thinking perhaps that beings as strange as these would surely clap in all the wrong places.

  Both my parents were at the station to meet us; but although my father shook our hands warmly, he immediately turned his attention to the officer in charge of the American soldiers, exchanging greetings with him in Russian and taking him aside. My mother, Kasimir, Piroshka and I were taken back to the apartment in a military car, while my father supervised the loading of the Americans and their luggage into a truck, and then himself disappeared with their officer in a car.

  I did not see him again until, several days later. He appeared at the apartment with the American officer and a young adjutant. My mother was roused from her sleep, and the four of them talked around the table. I overheard scraps of the conversation from the bedroom where I had been sent to read quietly. My mother was describing a number of patients with frostbite injuries, talking slowly in Russian, and repeating herself often so that the adjutant could take notes. The American’s Russian was stilted, and he made grammatical errors I would never have made, but without being corrected the way Piroshka corrected my mistakes. He said he wanted to transport several ‘suitcases’ (which my father finally ascertained were filing cabinets) back to Japan. He also mentioned Marshall Lin Biao, and said he had asked for complete secrecy.

  Although in later years I quizzed both my parents about the visit of the Americans, neither would say anything, nor even acknowledge that it had taken place. This mystery was not solved for many years, until the 1980s when both my parents were dead, and documents were released concerning Unit 731, a compound on the fringe of the city where Japanese doctors experimented on prisoners and lunatics. The frostbite experiments were perhaps the least brutal of their scientific endeavours. Other victims were spun in centrifuges or hung upside down until they died, had their stomachs or parts of their brains surgically removed, had flea-colonies lodged in their orifices, were used to test grenades or chemical weapons or had air injected into their arteries to study the onset of embolism. After the Japanese surrender, the Americans promised the doctors immunity from prosecution on condition that they release the meticulous records that were kept of each experiment. The Communist leadership in Harbin – including, I suppose, my father – were rewarded for their silence by a convoy of a dozen DC-3s, which landed at Harbin airport late one night, unloaded Japanese arms, ammunition and rations, and left before dawn the next day.

  *

  A few weeks after our return, I opened the door to my father and found him standing in the corridor, grinning from ear to ear, and holding a gramophone. ‘I have brought a gift for your birthday,’ he said, and manoeuvred awkwardly sideways into the room. ‘This will help you with your study of music.’ He greeted Kasimir, who was standing on a chair attempting to seal the windows in preparation for winter, and bent forward to place the gramophone on the table, gingerly, as if it were a sleeping child. It smelt of must and linseed oil. ‘I found it in a pawn shop,’ my father explained, running his fingers along the brass sound cone which was speckled with a patina
of bluish verdigris. ‘The pawnbroker gave me a good deal. It is yours now.’

  Next he removed from his satchel a stack of records in tattered brown paper sleeves and placed them on the table. He sat me down next to him, picked up the first record and showed it to me, insisting that we read together the Chinese characters printed on the circle of red paper at the centre of the disk. I knew the first two characters, but not the third. ‘Ba-la-mo,’ my father read out. I was mystified.

  ‘Ba-la-mo? What is that?’ I said. I was not familiar with the names of the composers in Chinese. At that time, I assumed one only spoke of composers in Russian.

  ‘Ba-la-mo,’ my father repeated, somewhat deflated. ‘He is my favourite composer. He is German.’

  I turned to Kasimir, who was attempting to stuff a thin strip of cloth into the window frame, and asked, in Russian, ‘Who is Ba-la-mo?’ Kasimir knitted his brows, then ran the fingers of his right hand over the top of his head and seemed to be looking for inspiration in his armpit.

  ‘Ba-la-mo,’ Kasimir said. ‘Brahms, of course. Ba-la-mo. Brahms.’

  ‘Of course,’ my father said, and picked up the next record. My father’s finger poked the characters as he half sang the word: ‘Tso-pin.’

  ‘Chopin,’ Kasimir said without looking away from his work.

  ‘Tsai-kou-su,’ my father read.

  ‘Tchaikovsky, I imagine,’ Kasimir said, and, pursing his lips, imitated the sound of a French horn and started to hum the march from the Fifth Symphony.

  ‘Te-fou-jia.’

  After glancing at the ceiling for a moment, Kasimir said, with a note of triumph, ‘Ah yes, must be Dvorak.’