The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  ‘And Director Ho . . .’

  ‘Director Ho sees one of the stars on our country’s flag trembling, and wants Tian and you to reach out your hands to steady it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Which one of the stars? The one that represents the bourgeois?’

  She turned away from me and looked out of the opposite window and was quiet for so long that I thought she would not reply to my question. ‘I am a simple person,’ she said eventually. ‘I know a lot about the struggle of our people, but I know very little about music. So my advice to you is the same advice I gave to my brother’s son when he left for the war in Korea.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Do not fail.’

  I wanted to ask if her brother’s son had failed; but by the way she turned her face from me once more and put her hand to the window I knew immediately what her answer would be. We rode on in silence, and after half an hour arrived at an airfield behind a row of low-slung barracks. Our car passed two check-points, and was then ushered onto the tarmac where a squat silver-grey aeroplane was being refuelled. Director Ho and Tian Mei Yun were waiting for me at the foot of the steps. ‘Hurry up,’ Director Ho said. ‘The pilot wants to leave as soon as possible.’ He took my suitcase from me and carried it up the steps on his head, like a coolie. Inside we were ordered to strap ourselves into the hard seats for take off. Apart from the three of us, the plane was filled with soldiers, young officers going to Bucharest for training, we were told. They seemed to have orders to speak to no one. Director Ho leaned over to me. ‘I have discussed this with Comrade Meretrenko,’ he said. ‘He has recommended the pieces you are to play. The scores are in my satchel.’

  It was my first flight, and had I not been wedged beside a large soldier who smoked incessantly and then fell into a fitful snoring sleep, I might have enjoyed it. After three or four hours we were all jolted into alertness as the plane lurched forward into a steep dive. The engines began to whine and the fuselage rattled and juddered. The soldier next to me woke up, blinking rapidly, and seized the armrest tightly. A hot water flask tumbled down the aisle and came to rest against the door to the cockpit. Pressure began to build up in my ears, dulling the strained sound of the engines. I looked behind me and saw Director Ho and Tian, eyes tight shut, backs pushed into their seats, cheeks taut and drained of colour.

  After several minutes, the plane came out of its dive, and moments later dropped its undercarriage and drifted in to land. I heard Tian vomit into a bag in the seat behind me, and I realised that I had grabbed hold of the hand of the soldier next to me and had sunk my nails into his skin. He held up his hand and looked at the tiny white crescent-shaped marks on the back of his hand. ‘Air force pilots,’ he said. ‘They say it’s a perfectly safe way to land, but I can never get used to it.’ We had arrived at an airstrip in what seemed to be an endless plain marked by scuffs of dry grass and thorny shrubs. We filed out of the plane and wandered around the airstrip rubbing our eyes and shaking life back into our limbs. The temperature was near freezing, but the air was dry and fresh. After the roar of the aircraft engine it seemed unnaturally silent, as if the cold desert air around us was absorbing all sound.

  I walked to the edge of the airstrip, enjoying while I could the crunch of gravel beneath my shoes, and noticed for the first time that the plain was not flat, but was dotted with small gently-sloping mounds of earth, of a uniform height, about half a metre. Like burial mounds, I thought, but immediately dismissed the idea, since there were so many of them, and they were spaced irregularly across so wide and expansive an area. Turning back to the plane, I watched Director Ho help Tian Mei Yun down the steps, whereupon our most promising young pianist spread out his padded coat on the tarmac and lay down on his back. Director Ho stood over Tian and appeared to exchange a few words with him. Tian flailed an arm around, like an insect that had been crushed under a bicycle tyre. The sound of their conversation died before it reached me.

  Director Ho left Tian and joined me at the edge of the runway. He held out to me a thin parcel of musical scores, tied with blue ribbon. ‘Bach,’ he said – the word seemed loud and harsh – and then, ‘Brahms and Mozart too,’ each composer’s name bringing forth a puff of steam from his mouth. I took the parcel from him. There was a note attached to the top score with a paper clip. Wan shi ru yi, it said, in Comrade Meretrenko’s uneven and trembling characters. May ten thousand good things fall into your hands. ‘He’s rather late for Chinese New Year,’ Director Ho commented.

  In the distance a gearbox chuckled, followed by the low complaint of an engine. We searched the horizon until Director Ho pointed out some low roofs in the distance, and a truck crawling across the desert towards us carrying a large tank. He returned to the prostrate figure of Tian Mei Yun and crouched down on one knee beside him. I turned away from the plane and read through my scores, filling the emptiness around me with the sound of an imaginary violin.

  Refuelling took half an hour, after which I helped Director Ho carry Tian, clammy with sweat despite the cold, back to his seat. We took off again, and in the course of the next ten hours our plane hopped across the continent, chasing the retreating sun and performing its dive-bomb landing at airfields in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan to refuel. Towards evening we floated over the Black Sea – sparkling like a sheet of hammered gold – and landed into the setting sun at Bucharest airport.

  A squat military truck backed up to our plane in the twilight as we disembarked, and wordlessly the soldiers and the pilots swung their bags into it and climbed aboard. The truck disappeared into the darkness, and the three of us walked to the arrivals hall, where a solitary official studied our passports, holding mine upside down until he found the photograph page, and sighed to himself as if we were some unfortunate fact of life, then raised a heavy blank telephone receiver and spoke softly into it for a minute before stamping our documents and waving us through a pair of solid wooden doors.

  We found ourselves alone in a draughty hall with a high vaulted ceiling from which two rows of bare light bulbs hung on long cords, casting about a grainy blue luminance. Tian lowered himself into a corner by a pillar and hung his head between his knees. Director Ho and I stood in the centre of the hall and watched the only other occupant of the place, a fat-cheeked woman who was washing the floor and who punctuated the rhythmic sway of her mop with loud wet sniffing. She made her way directly towards us from the far end of the hall, not acknowledging our presence until her mop brushed Director Ho’s shoes. She stopped her work, straightened her back, sniffed loudly and studied us for a moment, tilting her head to take us in. Then she resumed her mopping, making a detour around us so as to leave us standing on a dry semicircle of floor surrounded by wet slick.

  A man dressed in a Mao suit stepped through the main entrance, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light. When he spied us at the far end of the hall he turned quickly on his heels and strode towards us calling out apologies and clapping his hands repeatedly just beneath his chin. We pulled Tian to his feet, and the man introduced himself as an official from the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, before gathering up as much of our luggage as he could fit beneath his arms and leading us into dark night, where a car waited. I sat in the front, wedged between the official and the driver, while in the back Tian slumped across Director Ho’s lap, breathing heavily. Director Ho wiped his brow with a large handkerchief and whispered to him.

  ‘The Triumphal Arch!’ called our driver, raising a stubby finger in front of my face and wagging it at a floodlit edifice. He proceeded to point out the Great Hall of the Palace, various darkened castles and monasteries, and orthodox churches whose curved turrets reminded me of those dotted around Harbin. I was straining to hear what Director Ho was saying to Tian in the back seat: I caught only a repeated assurance that he would feel better in the morning, and a reminder that all of China’s hopes were resting upon his shoulders.

  At the embassy I was shown to a small high-ceilinged room who
se single light bulb succumbed with a soft pop after a second of life. In the brief flash of light I registered a narrow cot, a threadbare rug beside it and a small chair and table beneath a window. There was a sheet of notepaper on the table and I picked it up and studied it in the dim moonlight from the window. Something was written on it, but try as I might I could not make it out. I set it down, stowed my case and violin in a corner, and went immediately to bed.

  The note turned out to be a set of instructions to the dining hall in the basement, and at first light I made my way through the damp corridors of the building, guided at the last few turns by the smell of cooked cabbage. Director Ho was already there, in his characteristic white cotton shirt with the sleeves loosely rolled, talking with a sallow-faced man wearing a high-collared jacket. They were hunched over a table arrayed with small plates of food and a porcelain tea pot. Director Ho was pouring tea into two glasses and, upon seeing me in the doorway, summoned me and reached for a third glass. The other man reached his hand across the table as I sat down and introduced himself as the ambassador. ‘Welcome to Bucharest,’ he said, his voice thin, with a rising cat-like inflexion. ‘I hope your journey was not too exhausting, and that you slept well.’

  Before I could reply, Director Ho had started explaining the schedule for the four days of the George Enescu International Competition: at ten in the morning, formal registration at the Romanian Athenaeum; an hour each day to practice with the accompanist; then the drawing of lots to decide playing order, and then hours of waiting until my turn. Every evening there would be a reception. Tonight’s would be at the Cantacuzino Palace hosted by the Composers’ Union of Romania. He slurped at his glass of tea, and I quickly asked how Tian was. ‘We found a doctor for him at midnight,’ Director Ho said. ‘It is not serious. A bad case of airsickness, that’s all.’

  ‘Made worse by nerves, perhaps?’ said the ambassador.

  ‘He has no nerves,’ said Ho. ‘At least, not of that kind.’

  At that Tian himself arrived at the door, briefly steadied himself and walked gingerly towards us before lowering himself into a chair. He seemed exhausted by the effort and mumbled a greeting before dropping his head onto his forearms. Director Ho, the ambassador and I exchanged glances. Tian drew breath in long gasps.

  It was the ambassador who broke the silence: ‘How do you feel, Comrade?’ He smiled hopefully at me across the table.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Tian, without raising his head, and then he muttered something I could not hear.

  ‘What did you say?’ Director Ho asked, placing a hand on Tian’s shoulder. Tian repeated himself, his words again lost beneath his breath, and when none of us responded he raised his head with great effort and looked at each of us in turn, his eyes puffy and his lips cracked and dry.

  ‘I think I’ll play the Schubert,’ he said, and then dropped his head onto his forearms once more and was silent.

  Director Ho covered his face with his hands and drew breath noisily through the gap in his fingers. Then he spread two fingers to one side and looked down with one watery eye at the back of Tian’s bent head. He put his hands on the table and wearily pushed himself to his feet. ‘You must rest first,’ he said to Tian, taking him by the shoulders and gently raising him to his feet. ‘Fu Cong always slept for two hours before a performance.’ I noticed the ambassador’s brows tighten at the mention of Fu Cong, but then he too rose and took one of Tian’s arms and the three of them shuffled from the room and disappeared into the stairwell, leaving me with the debris of their breakfast.

  The week that followed was a disaster for Tian. He took no part in the competition, and hardly left his bed until it was time to leave. I performed my pieces – sonatas by Mozart and Brahms, and a Bach partita – over the course of several days, in the Romanian Athenaeum, and then, for the final performance, at the newly built Opera House in central Bucharest. While I played, the panel of judges seemed lost in their own reveries or in conversation with each other, but nevertheless I was awarded second prize, winning it jointly with a blonde American woman about my age who was shadowed throughout the competition by a teetering overstuffed sofa of a woman (her mother, I assumed, come to preserve her from the evils of world communism). My rival shook my hand politely during the presentation ceremony, and, when the time came for photographs, broke out the biggest and brightest set of teeth I had ever seen, and then shut them away again.

  After the ceremony Director Ho seized my hand in both of his and would not let go. He made several attempts to speak, but his mind was racing so fast that it seemed unable to turn thoughts into words. When I eventually extracted my hand from his grasp to receive the congratulations of one of the judges, Director Ho stammered, ‘I must cable Beijing immediately,’ and disappeared into the crowd. I barely spoke to him for the rest of the evening, which was spent travelling in a limousine (the Vice-President’s, I was told by our driver) to and from a succession of banquets and receptions.

  We were due to leave for home at noon the following day; but at five in the morning there was a loud knock on my door. ‘Comrade Xiao, Comrade Xiao, are you awake?’ It was Director Ho. ‘I must talk to you right now,’ he said. Before I could get out of bed he had opened the door and entered. He turned on the light, and there was a moment of brightness before the bulb again failed. In that brief second of illumination I saw that his clothes and hair were dishevelled. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ he said, stumbling in the dark towards the chair and scraping it noisily across the floor to my bedside. ‘I have been in constant communication with Beijing since last night,’ he said. ‘Yes, constant communication, including with the private secretary to Zhou Enlai himself. And I have told them that success can only breed more success.’ He paused to lick a drop of spittle from the corner of his mouth. ‘One must climb a mountain to see the plain beyond it. That is what I told them.’

  In turn he held up each of his papers so that it caught the meagre window light. The first, he said, was an invitation to travel to Paris to prepare for another competition, a much larger one with more competitors and more famous judges. The second was a ticket for a train that left Bucharest in three hours. Visas had been arranged for the two of us, and letters of introduction. Tian would return home at noon as planned. The competition was two weeks away, he explained, and – of this he seemed immensely pleased – in the interim I would receive tuition from the head of violin performance at the Paris Conservatoire, whom Zhou Enlai knew personally from his time in Paris in the 1920s. ‘And finally,’ he said, laying down the last of his papers, ‘to assure you that I have not forgotten how this all began, I have cabled your parents in Harbin with the news, and on our return I will arrange for you to return home to visit your father.’

  We sat in silence for a minute, and I realised that other presences had slipped into the room behind Director Ho and waited in the darkness too: the ambassadors of honour and fear. I sensed my father and mother, and Kasimir, and, strangely, the rabbi’s wife who had blessed me with a kiss. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with these dark shapes in the coolness of the room.

  ‘You must be tired,’ I said. ‘You have been working on my behalf all night.’

  ‘You might say that,’ Director Ho said.

  ‘Perhaps you should get some sleep before we have to leave for the station,’ I said. ‘Please, just leave the papers on the table. I will meet you at the front gate.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, his voice from the darkness suddenly edged with sadness. He stood and dragged the chair back towards the table by the window. I turned my face to the wall, and listened to the sound of his breathing as he lingered for a moment by the door.

  ‘How is Tian?’ I asked as he turned the handle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen him since the night before last. Don’t worry about him, though; worry about other things, better things.’ He closed the door softly and retreated down the stairs.


  9. Cultural Labours

  Director Ho and I did not board the train to Paris the next day. Something happened in Beijing overnight, some shift in polarity which one could guess at, but never hope to understand fully. The ambassador intercepted me at my door as I emerged with my suitcase and violin. He explained only that things had changed. Director Ho was nowhere to be found, and I dared not ask after him.

  I spent the morning with Tian, who had recovered enough to sit at a refectory table, practicing scales along its near edge and quizzing me about the competition, the judges, the audience, and the other competitors. Only when we had exhausted the subject, and he was executing an extended trill with the right hand amongst some breadcrumbs, setting chopsticks rattling atop a bowl beside me, did he look up momentarily and say, ‘Gongxi, gongxi. Congratulations! You must be very proud.’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Of course you must. Pride is a duty too.’

  Director Ho did not appear during the morning. I travelled to the airport with Tian beside me in the car wrapped in a blanket; although he assured me he felt much better, he succumbed to fits of shivering and muttered to himself several times that he was not looking forward to the flight. We waited for several hours in a draughty departure lounge. Our friends the soldiers arrived in the middle of the afternoon and greeted us warmly, asking us how the competition had gone. Tian seemed energised by their arrival: he produced a packet of cigarettes from his luggage and made a performance of staggering around the group clapping each soldier on the back and handing him a cigarette. They were a gift from me, he said, to celebrate my victory. The soldiers surrounded me and we shook hands merrily, filling the room with smoke and laughter.

  An airport official announced that our plane was ready and we filed out onto the tarmac. It was not until we were seated on the plane that Director Ho arrived, accompanied by the commanding officer. He waved to Tian and me, but spent the journey wedged into the seat next to the commanding officer, speaking to him occasionally in low tones and not leaving the plane at all during its refuelling stops.