The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  The Manchu woman proved to be correct. No one in our building – or indeed within the Bolshoi Prospekt – was affected. However, when the plague was over we discovered that it had killed Wang Taitai, who had been stranded on a visit to her sister, isolated from the rest of the city by armed barricades. Rations were thrown over the barricade, along with chlorinated lime and boric acid to cover the bodies of the newly dead. Of Wang Taitai’s family, only a ten-year-old child survived. My father delivered the news that Wang Taitai’s name had appeared one morning on the list of the dead. The official tally: san wan, three myriads.

  I felt secretly guilty. Although I knew Kasimir and Piroshka would never have allowed it, and my parents would never have approved, I felt that I could have walked through the city playing my violin, like the Pied Piper, and saved Wang Taitai and many others – could indeed have chased the plague into the river, where it would have been carried harmlessly to the sea. I could then have turned south to march with our troops, dispersing the Nationalist plague before us. I was simply born too late to save the city, but I promised myself that I would never again pass up an opportunity to serve the masses with my music.

  I expressed this ambition to my mother, and instead of dismissing it she turned to me and surveyed me from head to foot, circling around me, lifting my chin with her fingers and squaring my shoulders and straightening my spine. ‘I believe you may be ready,’ she said. ‘Do you agree, Uncle?’ she asked Kasimir, who was nearby. ‘Is she ready to begin performing?’ He pursed his lips, but after a moment nodded in agreement. ‘So you will arrange it?’ she went on. ‘You will prepare her?’ He nodded again.

  Shortly afterwards I began to play at the fortnightly meetings of the Harbin Musical Society, which were held in a hall attached to the (by that time defunct) American Baptist Church. My audiences were the regulars, a remnant weak and small, and something of a rogue’s gallery: musty intellectuals and White Russians who had eluded repatriation, sitting on the edges of their chairs, smelling of makhorka tobacco and hair oil, sunk deep within themselves like tortoises, or listening intently, bright-eyed, even slightly manic, with a foot wrapped around the opposite calf or a chin resting on the back of an inwardly turned hand. I found myself at each performance fixing my attention on one of them – a man in a velvet smoking jacket, wearing a monocle; an orthodox priest with a coloured scarf wrapped tightly around his head to alleviate his neuralgia; a younger woman with glossy undulations of thick black hair, whose preferred outfit was pin-striped trousers and a tailored coat, beneath which one could see a waistcoat of green stuff, a silk blouse and a cravat; an old man with swaying jowls, wearing a fez, and holding a lighted cigarette upright between his fingers like a joss stick. I would narrow my eyes until only that person remained in focus, and then play to my chosen audience of one, blocking the others from my mind.

  Then one night when Piroshka was not with us Kasimir took me, not to the Musical Society, as he had told her, but to an old working-class area, and down a series of unpaved streets and alleys, though a courtyard hung about with damp washing, to a tiny house with a light in the parlour window and the sound of a violin and a clarinet seeping through the walls. We stepped directly into a small parlour, warm with the smells of beer, sweat, sausage and tobacco, and found it filled with more than a dozen people, adults and children of all ages, sitting or standing around a group of musicians: a small boy playing a violin with only three strings; two older men, both wearing hats (the boy’s father and grandfather, I was to learn), playing respectively a viola and a mandolin; a woman in a baggy dress occasionally contributing a bar or two with a clarinet; and, seated in their midst, a teenage girl with a surly expression on her face heaving a small octagonal concertina to and fro on her knee. They were playing some sort of reel, with an irregular rhythm and tempo, punctuated from time to time with what, to my ear, sounded like false notes, although they were repeated again and again so must have been deliberate. I heard a clicking sound behind me and turned to find a man in a rough jerkin made of sheepskin holding two spoons between his fingers and rattling them in turn against one hip and then against his other hand, held just inches from my ear.

  ‘Klezmer,’ Kasimir said into my other ear, and any other words of explanation were lost as he was greeted with squeals and hugs and full-lipped kisses by several women. The men nodded to him, the musicians carried on, and despite the cramped conditions an old man and a young child began to dance, caracoling this way and that amongst the sawdust and spittle and beer-spills.

  My violin case was taken from me, along with the Brahms I had practiced. I made several lunges to retrieve them, but was held back firmly by the shoulders. A woman opened the case, removed my violin and handed it to the boy in the centre of the room, who swapped it for his three-stringed instrument without hesitation and carried on with the tune, throwing me an appreciative glance. I smiled back, and then found his instrument being forced into my hands, and from across the room Kasimir called to me, ‘Just forget everything I have taught you; forget major and minor, forget your keys and scales and progressions; forget it all and just play.’

  And so I learned to play klezmer, with Kasimir shouting instructions for the first few tunes, then leaving me to it after being drawn into the dance by an old woman, who seized his deadened hand and planted it first on her waist and then around her neck and led him around the room. After a while one of the dancers, a tall man with a curled moustache, broke away and, without a word, relieved me of my violin. He started to play it himself, holding it in the crook of his elbow, and I found myself promoted to the dance, spun around in precise turns by the firm, warm hands of a young man whom I guessed to be no more than fourteen, although I was surprised, after several minutes, to find him displaced by a young woman who placed an infant in his arms, pushed him aside with some harsh words, and began to dance with me. ‘His wife,’ Kasimir mouthed to me. ‘And a jealous one at that.’

  After an hour or more the dancers began one by one to drop onto chairs. The old woman who had claimed Kasimir announced that she was finished for the evening, and grasped both of his hands and kissed each of his fingers on the second knuckle, before attempting to pass him on to another old woman. Kasimir escaped only by pressing his palm against his chest and feigning an angina attack.

  Food began appearing on metal plates, and glasses of vodka and tea, and the noise in the room died down as these were consumed. One by one the band stopped playing until it consisted of just me (reunited with my own violin) and the girl on the concertina. We played on, and I managed, through whispers and nudges, to manoeuvre the tune around to a dance alla zingarese from the end of one of Brahms’s piano quartets, which I played with accelerating tempo and adding in the false klezmer notes I had now learned, enticing the boy violinist, vodka glass in hand, into a solo dance, and drawing from Kasimir the widest of smiles and then a salute as he raised his glass to the ceiling in a silent toast.

  Afterwards, as we walked through the cold, darkened streets, Kasimir made me promise not to tell Piroshka where we had been, but when we arrived home she seemed already to know. She sniffed at Kasimir’s coat as she took it from him, her face screwing up in its clatter of lines and plates. ‘Makhorka,’ she muttered to herself. I sensed Kasimir preparing to stage a retreat, but she merely eyed us strangely and gave out a long sigh. ‘I gather you have been taken to meet the klezmorim,’ she said to me, ‘our Ashkenazi heimish at their most pure and free.’

  ‘I made sure they didn’t put vodka in her tea,’ Kasimir protested.

  ‘That’s good, but I’m more concerned about what they put in her head,’ Piroshka replied, and she squeezed both my temples between her palms and then hugged my head to her breast and added, ‘. . . or what they removed from it.’ Then she began to laugh quietly, continuing to do so every few minutes as we prepared for bed.

  *

  Later that month I went with Kasimir and Piroshka to see the movie Eight Thousand Li of Clouds and Moon. It tells the sto
ry of Xian Xinghai, China’s first great violinist and the composer of the National Liberation Symphony. In the most memorable scene he attempts to console an audience of soldiers and peasants hiding in a village after the defeat of the Guangzhou Commune, in which his own uncle has been killed. As he begins to play, Xian starts to rise above the earth and, as in a woodcut of some ancient fable, hovers over the startled crowd, making to fly away until one of the soldiers climbs onto the shoulders of a peasant and seizes him by the heel. So long as Xian continues to play he is lighter than air, and the crowd gathers into a circle, the soldiers balancing on the backs of the peasants and tethering him to the earth with their rough hands until he finishes his performance and regains his weight.

  That night I dreamt I was flying over the city. My neighbours and schoolmates gathered in groups and pointed at me and called up to me as I hovered and swooped. Then I noticed to my horror that the body of my violin had become my left arm, that my fingers were the keys, and my veins and tendons the strings. I looked to my right and found my hand was gone, and in its place, growing out of the stump of my forearm, was my bow, articulated at the wrist like a single, elongated talon. I was at one with the instrument. And then there was a painful pressure in my foot and I looked down to find that my neighbours had formed a human pyramid whose topmost member had seized me by the ankle. They dragged me down to the ground and tied my foot to a tree and left me there.

  *

  The summer passed, then autumn, and winter approached again. The news from the front improved week by week. My father reopened the quarantined neighbourhoods, reducing their number by two to fifty-six to take account of the deaths. I arrived home from school one day in November to find both my parents at the apartment – an unusual event for the daytime – and wearing new clothes, made of a deep blue cloth, with sharp creases on the jacket sleeves and the trouser legs, so sharp, in fact, that I recall thinking how diminished my parents looked, as if they had no substance, like the air in the bellows of an accordion, and could now be folded up and inserted into these envelopes of blue.

  My father sat forward on a chair, one leg crossed over the other, his foot tucked behind the opposite calf. He looked immensely happy with himself, unable to stop smiling. He was smoking a cigarette and he closed his eyes as he inhaled, with an expression not unlike the one he had when he listened to me play my violin. Then he opened them again, and looked at me, with quiet affection, but without speaking.

  My mother stood behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders. ‘The war is over,’ she told me. ‘Soon all of China will be liberated. We are flying to Beijing in an hour. Chairman Mao Zedong will address the people.’ For the first time in years I became aware of the detail of my mother’s appearance. Until now, she had been constantly in motion, always vacating the space she occupied, as her thoughts ran far ahead of her body, diagnosing and treating her next patient, serving the needs of the next person. When she was with me I sensed I only had part of her, a part that was following instructions, implementing plans, while the rest of her – the thinking, feeling spine of her – was engaged elsewhere. So I had not noticed until now that her hair had become thin and was starting to grey at the roots, that her shoulders had settled into a permanent sag, that the skin on her cheeks had become pallid and stained with red creases like a map that is repeatedly folded and unfolded.

  My father sang softly to himself between puffs on his cigarette as he waited for my mother to pack her things into a small case. ‘I wish we could take you with us, but there are not enough seats on the plane,’ he said. ‘It is a military plane,’ he said, as if that explained everything. And then, ‘Be sure to practice hard while we are away. China will need violinists to strengthen the morale of the people. We will be away for a week or so. Then when we return we will all be a family at last. We will be happy. We will live in a house together. We will have enough food to eat. All of China will be happy. Everyone under heaven will be happy now.’

  ‘I am already happy,’ I said.

  ‘Let me assure you,’ my father said, wagging his index finger at the ceiling, ‘once all of China is united under Mao Zedong thought the happiness you have now will seem in comparison like deepest sadness.’

  While I was still pondering this statement my mother re-entered the room and announced that she was ready. She placed her hand on my head, and my father, awkwardly, shook my hand. I noticed a young man waiting by the open door. He took the suitcase from my mother, and the three of them smiled at each other smugly and clattered down the stairs and into a car and were gone.

  They returned ten days later, bursting into the apartment in the evening when I was getting ready for bed. My father was carrying a reel of film in a large tin under his arm. My mother threw her suitcase onto the bed and took my hand. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘we are going to watch the newsreel of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen, proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic.’ I dressed quickly and followed my parents down the stairs into the waiting car, noticing that they sat together very close, clasping each other by the hand. During that journey my parents seemed impossibly happy. They laughed at everything the other said. They laughed at what I said, at what the driver said. They laughed until they had to wipe tears from their eyes. My father put his arm around me and crushed me to his ribs. ‘Ah, what bliss to have not one girl, but two,’ he said, and burst out laughing again. I felt a surge of pleasure at the warmth of his embrace, but realised, with a sense of something like fear, that things would never be the same again.

  We drove down to the municipal offices, where a crowd of party members had gathered in a large meeting room. That year the Da Leng, the Great Cold, had arrived early, and since my father had refused to relent on his decree that there would be no heating in the city until the middle of November, the room was chilly despite the warmth of many bodies. My father held the reel of film above his head like a trophy as we entered the room and were greeted with cheers. He handed the metal box to the projectionist who quickly threaded the film, and shouted for the lights to be extinguished. The screen remained white for a time, and the wedge of light from the projector illuminated the tendrils of steam rising from our heads as if we were all gently smouldering. For a second a blurry infestation of worm-like stains wriggled in the top corner of the screen and then a series of descending numbers appeared at the centre of a kind of target. We counted them down: ‘wu – si – san – er – yi.’ The screen and the room went black momentarily, and then, with the sound of a strangled fanfare, white characters emerged out of the fog of a black background – ‘Victory for the Masses! China awakes to a new dawn!’

  Suddenly I was in Beijing. There was a crowd, the biggest I had ever seen, delirious with excitement, waving banners with big bold characters written on them. A woman’s voice was describing the gathering – how many delegates there were from Gansu and from Liaoning, how many peasants, how many intellectuals, how many bourgeois – and reading out what was written on the banners:

  ‘Celebrate the victory of Mao Zedong and Zhu De!’

  ‘The nation says thankyou to the People’s Liberation Army!’

  ‘All of China’s minorities welcome the victory of the Communist Party!’

  ‘Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’

  For each banner, a smiling face, and a wave to the camera. And then a roar of welcome as a company of the People’s Liberation Army marched into the square, walking in time, but with the syncopated tempo of comrades dancing, rather than the unanimous, metronomic swing of the parade ground.

  The troops turned to salute the line of figures on the top of Tiananmen, and the camera panned along the faces. I felt my mother’s warm breath as she whispered the names into my ear: Liu Shaoqi, Mao Zedong, Peng Zhen, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun. Mao stepped forward to a copse of microphones, shiny silver boxes balanced on the top of metal stands, sprouting hoops, springs and black wires. He held before him a sheet of paper with characters written in the old s
tyle, top to bottom. I was fascinated by his curtain of thick black hair, set far back on his skull as if fleeing the light of the intellect resting under the smooth expanse of his forehead.

  Mao began to read from the paper, slurring the words in the broad Hunan provincial accent which made him unintelligible to most Chinese, in particular to the people of the Northeast with our perfectly standard pronunciation. There was a murmur of dismay in the crowd, and someone near me asked without irony if it was English that Mao was speaking. My father stood up, motioned to the projectionist to hold the film and produced from under his jacket a thick sheaf of papers. ‘A transcript of Chairman Mao’s address,’ he explained, and began to pass the papers around to the eager hands extended to him from all angles. There was a rustle of papers and a round of coughing, and then the projector stirred into life again and the film continued, except now instead of a sea of heads in front of me all I could see was the bobbing transcripts held above the audience’s heads so they could be read by the light of the projector. I recall nothing of the speech itself except for the last line, when Mao put down his paper and shouted, ‘China has arisen!’ The crowd at Tiananmen erupted with cheers – as did the audience packed into the room that night – and Mao retreated to the line of august faces.