The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  I am sitting at his desk right now, typing this on his typewriter, drinking the cup of tea his wife has made for me. I have asked Mitya, in the event of my death, to find some way to get the violin and the letters to you. I told him you would be in one of three places: Harbin, Shanghai or New York, and he put his hand on my shoulder and assured me that he would find you, as if these places were not immense haystacks and the two of you not tiny pins. But what else can I do?

  I must sign off this letter which I hope one day to retrieve and destroy. I kiss your hands, beloved Mama and Papa.

  Your son,

  Vitja

  When I had finished reading I glanced up at the clock and found that it was already very late. I did not know where Kasimir and Piroshka were, or when they would return. I looked down at the street below, where workers were making for home on their bicycles and carts and a convoy of army trucks rumbled past the corner carrying mute rows of young soldiers, tossing from side to side in unison like bottles in a crate. I arranged the letters on the table in order, with the typed one on top, locked the violin in its case and placed the key by the letters, and made sure the latch clicked shut as I let myself out into the crisp, cool silence of the hallway.

  6. Passacaglia

  For several decades a large mural covered a wall in the foyer of the administration building of China Eastern Railways. It depicted Mao Zedong’s arrival at the Harbin Railway Station in 1950. At its centre is the great man himself in a heavy swirling greatcoat and workers’ cap, with the sun breaking from behind him and his feet not quite touching the ground, and gathered about him there are workers and children turning their faces to his light, like heliotropic flowers. I have never seen the original, since it was painted several years after I left Harbin. However, it was one of the full colour plates in a picture book I acquired in the 1960s, entitled The People’s Republic of China: The First Five Year Plan. When my children were young I would show them the page, telling them, ‘That’s my mother, your Ama; and that’s my father, your Agon,’ and indicating a couple who did not look in the slightest like my parents. ‘And that’s me,’ I told them, pointing to the little girl at their side with her hair in short pigtails and a red-rose bloom in her cheeks, holding a violin and bow under her arm.

  Attached to the wall beside the mural, I was told, was a small outline sketch naming all the individuals present: the Party Secretary, the Mayor, the leader of the most productive unit in the Railway Workshops, the President of the Heilongjiang Branch of the All China League of Women, a Soviet engineer, a prominent Manchu peasant leader. In 1961 the names of my parents were removed, and after 1966 the reference to Xiao Magou, violinist, was also deleted.

  My memory is curiously empty of impressions of Mao’s visit, although my parents talked of little else for years to follow. There is a photograph of me shaking hands with Mao and Li Jiefu, Director of the Shenyang Conservatory, after my performance. My mother sent it to me with one of the last letters she posted to my Paris address. I am dressed in a blue trouser suit, and both the men seem somewhat taken aback by my height (I am taller than Li) and large-boned physique. In the flash of the camera my face is white except for my black butterfly lips and the dried-cherry eyes pressed into my skin like covered buttons.

  Indeed for many years all I remembered of my encounter with the great man was that unbearable light, emanating not so much from the camera flash as from Mao himself, like the light depicted in portraits of saints and deities. However, as time passed I began to reclaim other impressions, which I must have suppressed at the time: the eye-watering stench of Mao’s halitosis, his teeth like shards of jade set in resinous gums behind which prowled a tongue like a freshly shucked mollusc, and the curious sensation that he was a kind of optical illusion, a trick with mirrors, and that I was extending my hand not to a real person but to some aspect of myself, something universal; the real Mao, if he was indeed present at all, was standing behind my back, his hand reaching forward to poke me in the back of the ribcage.

  *

  On the day after my lesson with Comrade David I arrived at the apartment at the usual time and found Kasimir and Piroshka sitting waiting for me. Kasimir was at the table, reading a score, Piroshka beside him facing the open window, her chin sunk into the heel of an out-turned hand, and her face caressed from time to time by shifting grids of sunlight from the movements of the embroidered net curtain in the breeze. I had the sense that they had been sitting this way in silence for several hours. The violin case was still on the table where I had left it, the cover open and the red satin cloth neatly folded, as if it were a small coffin open for a viewing. The pile of letters lay beside it, weighed down by a large river stone, and as the curtain shifted a rhomboid of intense sunlight would illuminate the crinkled papers and reveal as intense blue the ink that, when cast back into the shade, appeared black.

  I pulled out a chair and sat opposite them.

  ‘Welcome,’ Kasimir said, and reached out his hand to touch Piroshka’s shoulder.

  ‘I found the letters in the lining of the case,’ I said, thinking it best not to conceal anything. ‘I have read only the top one.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Piroshka said. ‘You are so young, and we would not expect you to understand such things.’

  ‘But I do understand,’ I insisted, and then added, ‘What will you do with the violin?’

  ‘Why, keep it, of course,’ said Piroshka. ‘It was a gift from the Grand Duke, as you now know.’

  ‘And may I . . . play it?’ I said. ‘One day, I mean. Not now, of course.’

  Kasimir and Piroshka looked at each other. ‘Why not now?’ Kasimir said. ‘Clearly I cannot play it; so if anyone is to play it, that is likely to be you.’

  ‘If . . . ?’ I said.

  ‘What violin is not meant to be played?’ Kasimir went on. ‘What is a violin if it is not played? A wooden box? The carcass of a beautiful insect? What is it if it is not played?’ He turned back the velvet cover to reveal the body of the violin and put his mouth to the strings and blew so that the strings started to vibrate softly – G, D, A, E. ‘It has not been played for many years; not since another girl your age played it.’

  ‘Ach, but in her hands it was a mere toy,’ Piroshka sniffed, and, wiping the moistness from her eyes with her fingertips, gave me a rare smile.

  ‘She was a princess,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she was a princess,’ Kasimir said, ‘a bright and happy girl. She would bring us sweets she had stolen from her mother’s room, and lay her head on my knee and tell me about what she and her sisters had been doing on the estate. And then she would pick up the violin without tuning it and play . . .’ Kasimir hesitated and looked across at his wife and I saw her eyes widen and an energy flowed between them, like a sheet of lightning. ‘And play awfully!’ he exclaimed, and then he let out an explosion of laughter. ‘Just dreadful – was she not, Pipi? – so that the hairs on your neck would bristle with anguish, and I laboured like Hercules to teach her to play sweetly, because I had promised her father that I would make something of her.’

  Piroshka had covered her eyes with a palisade of bony fingers and was giving out irregular honks of mirth. ‘But you, fond idiot, you encouraged her! You would praise even her worst performances and call her milachka and solnyshko, and dance around and twirl on your heels as she played on and on, out of key, out of tempo, out of her depth. Idiot, foolish souls, the both of you!’

  ‘You too were besotted with her!’

  ‘Yes, Kuzma, we both were,’ Piroshka said, slowly wiping the length of her index finger along her eye socket, ‘but how we would laugh in the droshky on our way home afterwards, laugh at her terrible phrasing and the way she poked her tongue to one side as she played . . . oh, and her fearsome earnestness.’

  Kasimir looked at me across the table. ‘She was like the daughter we never had.’

  ‘That is true,’ Piroshka nodded. ‘Well, the first such daughter. Your mother was the second . . . the second
daughter we never had. Ach, that girl, that sweet, silly child. How much better for her had she in fact been our daughter. How we ached for her, did we not?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Kasimir, and in a moment his laughter fell away, save for a quiet chuckle like the last wash of water into a drain.

  Piroshka turned to face me. ‘Since you have read the letter, you know that our son, Vitja, is ill,’ she said. ‘You know that this violin was sent to us by a man called Dmitri, a composer who is the son of my late friend, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina.’ She took from under Kasimir’s forearm some large sheets of handwritten music, and unfolded them in front of me. ‘Dmitri has written some music for our son,’ she said, softening her voice, as if in reverence to the sheets of paper. ‘It is a piece to be played on the violin, on this violin. And we would like you to learn it.’

  I studied the sheet Piroshka had set before me. It was headed with the Roman numeral III and a word I had never seen. ‘Passacaglia,’ Piroshka said, seeing my puzzled look. ‘It means a series of variations over a repeated bass tune. Think of the finale to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.’ The music was in 3/4 time, in the key of A minor, beginning with a low F to be played forte-forte.

  ‘You will be only the second person to play this music,’ Piroshka said, ‘and the first to play it in public.’

  ‘Where is the violin part?’ I asked. Piroshka turned the first sheet over and pointed to a treble clef written above the piano part, beginning at the top of the page, where there was a single line of notes marked piano espressivo.

  ‘Shall we begin?’ Piroshka said.

  I nodded, and glanced at the violin on the table, and then at Kasimir, whose eyes tightened slightly. Not yet, he mouthed. I opened my own violin case.

  It was difficult music. The fanfare opening went on for several bars and then dropped into a series of quiet chords. The entry of the violin was timed so that it slipped in on the last beat of a bar, and it was scored to be so quiet that it was barely perceptible, but simply rose from amidst the lengthening notes of the accompaniment like a lonely seabird trailing a retreating storm. I had to repeat it twice before getting it right. And the timing problems continued: the numbers in the back of my head seemed wrong, so that the dancer within me instinctively turned left, as it were, only to find that the score had turned right. ‘Seventeen,’ Kasimir whispered to me, ‘the measure of the theme is seventeen, so you must count in your head to seventeen.’ We stumbled through the first dozen pages, and then through a long second section in which the violin plays with only the lightest of accompaniments, engaged in reveries of its own. Then, at the end of a page, and far from anything that might serve as a home, musically speaking, the score abruptly ended.

  ‘There is a page missing,’ I said.

  ‘That is how it is written,’ Piroshka said. ‘Remember this piece is one movement in a concerto, and unfortunately we do not have the others.’

  I said it sounded to me as if the music was ending with a question.

  ‘Is it so strange to end with a question?’ Piroshka said. ‘In revolutionary Russia people are encouraged to ask questions.’

  Kasimir, who had been listening silently, said from across the room, ‘Your playing is good, but it is too sweet. This is not a sweet piece. It needs to be played with bile; it needs to be guttural.’

  ‘What is bile?’ I asked. ‘And what is guttural?’

  ‘Bile is the bad taste in your mouth after you have been sick,’ Kasimir answered. ‘And guttural is . . . is the hawking sound people make before they spit.’

  Piroshka raised an eyebrow. ‘Find a better way to explain it, Kasimir Alexandrovich,’ she said. ‘How can she spit with a violin?’

  ‘I agree it is not a pleasant way of speaking, Piroshka Iakovlevicha,’ he said, rising to his feet and tapping on the window with his fingertips, ‘but it is what the piece requires.’

  ‘There you are, my dear,’ Piroshka said to me. ‘You must attempt to play the piece so as to sound like a nauseous person clearing her throat of spittle. Simple, yes?’

  ‘You make your point,’ Kasimir conceded with a gesture from his good hand. ‘Go home, now,’ he said to me. ‘Think about it overnight, and we can discuss it tomorrow. Surprise us with your maturity, perhaps.’

  As I packed to leave I asked if it might help if I could play the violin in the case. ‘As if the violin itself might be sick and angry?’ Piroshka said as she retreated to the kitchen, and Kasimir smiled at me and whispered, ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ and bent his head towards the violin in the case.

  *

  The next day I tried to play the piece again, and again Kasimir complained that I had not found the right tone. I had tried to play in an ugly and strained fashion – loudly, roughening my bowing technique and slurring the notes. But he said I should not substitute imprecision and deliberate blemishes for genuine anger and desolation.

  ‘Genuine anger!’ Piroshka complained from the piano. ‘She is a child. Her anger and desolation it is that of the playground. Is that what you want?’

  Kasimir brushed aside her comment, and addressed me directly. ‘Here is the challenge to you as the artist: to convey anger in your playing, and despair, and disgust, and courage. But how to do that? Does it help if you feign anger yourself? I say no. If anything, your own emotion is an obstacle. The emotion is here, in the notes the composer has written, and the job of the artist is not to feel the emotion, but, like a window, to transmit that emotion from the darkened room of the composer’s mind to the world outside.’

  I could not suppress a sigh of frustration, and Piroshka rolled her eyes and said, ‘You are confusing the girl, Kasimir. Yesterday you asked her to be bilious and guttural; today you tell her she should feel nothing.’

  The two of them argued back and forth. After a while I lost track of their arguments and started reading over the difficult passages once more, running through the complex rhythms in my head. Their voices merged into one another in the background, until I realised that they had abruptly stopped talking and that Kasimir had addressed me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was daydreaming.’

  ‘I asked you if you were willing to keep a secret,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘We want to give you another letter to read,’ he said. ‘It explains how this piece of music was written, what the composer was thinking and feeling, and what he was trying to convey. I have agreed to let you read the letter, and then I will say no more about how the piece should be played. It will be for you to decide.’ Kasimir handed me an envelope containing several sheets of paper, and he and Piroshka sat quietly as I spread the pages out on the table.

  Like the other letter, it was in Russian. ‘Let us know if there are any words you don’t understand,’ Piroshka said. ‘And you must also promise something.’ She placed her hand over the letter. ‘Promise that you will not tell your parents about this letter. I fear they may not appreciate that the things it says relate to what has happened in Russia, and have no bearing upon what happens here in China.’ I did not understand what she meant, but promised not to tell my parents. The letter was written in long-hand, but with a steady, regular script that was easy to read once I became used to its repeated dashes and loops. It read:

  June 1950

  My dear Kasimir Alexandrovich and Piroshka Iakovlevicha,

  My heart is heavy as a lump of lead in my chest as I sit down to write, and yet I feel a sense of light-headedness, of vertigo. After all these years of silence from my family, I have now to communicate bad news to you concerning your son, Vitja. Not the worst news, but bad enough.

  I have a selfish hope that some other letter has reached you to advise you of his situation, and that mine will not be the first. Nevertheless, after a year trying to track you down, I have discovered you are still in Harbin, and now fortune has provided me with the most reliable of couriers, and I cannot pass up the opportunity to write.

  But to Vitja – he is passably well in bo
dy, but has suffered torments of his mind and spirit that I fear have caused his soul to depart prematurely; where to, I do not know, and I do not believe it will ever return as we have known it. He was picked up by the police, huddled under a bridge by the Moscow River, calling out threats and oaths, and shivering from the cold because under his coat he was completely naked. They took him for a drunk at the start, and locked him in a cell overnight with only a thin blanket. The next morning they called in a doctor from the insane asylum, since Vitja had cried out without ceasing throughout the night. It was this doctor who told me the story. (She is a distant cousin of Vsevolod Frederiks, who is married to my sister Marusya – perhaps you received Marusya’s letter regarding her marriage, since she sent it to Harbin.) The doctor tells me that his illness may one day be ameliorated, but that there is no treatment other than confinement to an asylum. I have done for him what I can, and found a place for him in an asylum outside Moscow that is run by people with some humanity, although meagre resources.

  As to what precipitated Vitja’s breakdown, where do I begin? His is the sickness that has been creeping upon us all for . . . how many years now, I do not know. Others are dead of the same sickness. And many more are made drowsy by it, or simply struck dumb. I suffer from it too, although, as you may have heard, fortune has smiled upon the small sparrow-like boy with the big spectacles whom you first knew at the Conservatoire as Musya’s little brother. I have had some success as a composer, enough that I am now known as the ‘Court Composer’ of the Soviet Union. This is a blessing only in that my family and I live comfortably, and I have a room with two pianos and the use of a dacha at the artists’ colony at Komarova during the summer.

  Even so I still live in a house made of paper. We all do; those of us that remain. Indeed the world of which you and Glazunov and Akhmatova and Meyerhold were a part, that world which nurtured me as a child, that St Petersburg of poets, and thinkers, and artists, and musicians, which believed that it held the soul of Russia in its hands – it turned out to be a city of paper; with substance, yes, a beautiful city of marbled paper, but fragile and now mostly reduced to ash, blown about by the wind.