The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  Madame Huang explained that a reception for all the Soviet advisors had been organised for that evening to allow me to familiarise myself with my new listening post. Kirill was back in Shanghai, she said, and we were eagerly awaiting his next visit.

  ‘Regarding your request to visit your parents,’ she said, pursing her lips as if she had just swallowed something sour, ‘I am afraid that is not convenient right now. You are too important to us here, and nobody else can do your work.’ She placed her hand on mine and gave my fingers a squeeze. ‘Be assured that the Party is looking after your father,’ she said. ‘I personally have spoken with the Party Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Government. He is well connected in Beijing.’

  That night I climbed from the window at the top of the stairwell onto the fire escape, where I stole a quick glance at the stars and the moon, stepped as quietly as I could down the steep metal staircase (ducking when it passed the window of an apartment), slid open the panel on the third floor, edged into the darkness, and settled myself into position. The workmen had installed a platform that I could lie on, about two metres above the floor, and ventilation grilles that circulated air and enabled me to see part of the living room and the bedroom.

  Over the nights that followed, Pavel and Raya resumed their conjugal life, speaking to each other less, but with an odd courtesy. Every night they ate the meal Raya had prepared, and then Pavel cleaned up in the kitchen and they read books or newspapers and smoked cigarettes before going to bed. They rarely talked at length, and when they did they soon found themselves sliding towards an angry exchange and immediately pulled back. I wondered if they had some inkling that I was there listening to them; but then concluded that they had simply formed a truce, agreeing that arguments that could not be won were not worth starting.

  The leaves were falling from the trees by the time Kirill returned to the building. I was returning from the Conservatory on my bicycle at dusk one day, and as I turned into our street my path was illuminated from behind by the headlights of a car. It tailed me for the last hundred metres, the street being too narrow to permit it to pass. I parked my bicycle and saw Kirill reversing out of the back seat onto the kerb, setting onto the sidewalk bottles of vodka and wine, a pile of new books tied up with string, and cartons of cigarettes which, later that evening, I would recognise as the same pungent-smelling ones I had watched Raya smoke at her door the night I had been trapped in the apartment. I offered to help him and he gave me a smile and thanked me as I picked up his stack of books and preceded him up to the third floor. I deliberately continued past Pavel and Raya’s door, but he called me back. I put the books in the doorway as he knocked, and then, without waiting for any further acknowledgement, I ran up the remaining flights of stairs, throwing my violin onto my bed and climbing as fast as I could down the fire escape and into my listening post. The first thing I heard was the scraping of a chair.

  ‘You will excuse me,’ Kolya was saying as I put my ear to the grille. ‘Some paperwork cries out for me upstairs.’

  ‘How can you think of going, Kolya?’ Raya said. ‘Our guest has just arrived. How rude of you!’

  ‘And see, I have brought the Moskovskaya,’ Kirill said. ‘Ten bottles, no less. If you go, Pavel will drink the lot and you will have none. Here, Raya, bring glasses.’

  ‘Please, no,’ Kolya said. ‘I need to work. I can’t drink and work. That is a skill I have never learned.’

  ‘You have grown pale over the summer,’ Kirill lamented. ‘Are you working too hard? Have you been fasting? A single man like you needs some company. Stay a while.’

  ‘I have been enjoying your company since we sucked at our mothers’ breasts,’ Kolya said. ‘I am not short of your company.’

  ‘Pavel will be back soon with some delicacies from across the river,’ Raya said, and through the grille I saw her standing behind Kolya, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing him back into a chair. She was mouthing words to Kirill, who sat across from Kolya, below my line of sight.

  ‘What is Pavel doing over there? Is he playing provisioner now?’ Kolya said as he squirmed beneath Raya’s weight.

  ‘Mitrofan has been taking him on his little excursions to show him the ropes,’ Raya said. ‘You knew that, surely. He needs to get the measure of our Jewish friends before Mitrofan leaves.’

  ‘What measurements is he taking?’ Kolya said, struggling free of Raya and pushing his chair back. ‘This fraternisation with undesirables is . . . I will have a word with him, Kirill, I promise.’

  ‘Don’t fret, my friend,’ said Kirill. ‘Just stay with us and eat.’

  At that moment a noise was heard on the stairs. ‘Ah, Pavel! Pavel, is that you?’ Kirill called.

  ‘Kirill Mikhailovic! What a surprise!’ Pavel called from the entrance. ‘I didn’t know you were back in Shanghai.’

  ‘I really must go,’ Kolya said. ‘Once I have finished my report I will come back.’

  ‘Promise me you will,’ Raya said. ‘Let me find your jacket.’ Raya and Kolya left the room and I could hear them in the vestibule talking in hushed tones. Pavel, meanwhile, entered the room and placed a canvas bag on the table as Kirill rose from his chair.

  ‘Welcome, Kirill Mikhailovic,’ Pavel said, leaning across the table to embrace Kirill. ‘It is good to have you back. How are things in Moscow? Does the spring continue?’

  ‘The spring continues, yes,’ said Kirill. ‘This winter could be the best spring we have had in years.’

  ‘Oh, how I love the way you diplomats talk. I love everything about you diplomats.’

  ‘You should show some restraint,’ said Kirill. ‘Now, what is in the bag?’

  ‘Not much. Some cod liver salad, a brace of roast pigeons, some chanterelles, and some more knydl, I particularly like their knydl.’

  ‘And tell me about your work,’ Kirill said, as he helped Pavel remove the food from his canvas bag.

  ‘My work?’

  ‘It’s what you are here for. Isn’t it?’

  ‘My work proceeds as well as I can hope. We lost the repertoire last year, you may recall, but now it is mostly back in fashion.’

  ‘But what are your students composing?’

  ‘Shit mainly, if you must know,’ Pavel said. ‘Read Kolya’s reports. I am teaching my students to write song cycles for the peasants on the collective farms. You know, titles like “Chickenshit is fine, but pigshit is the better manure” and “Chairman Mao says to eat greens is glorious”.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Read Kolya’s reports.’ Pavel folded the canvas bag and put it under the table.

  ‘No, I want to hear it from you.’

  ‘I am not in the mood. Now help me set this food out. Where is Raya? Where are you, Raya?’

  ‘I am here.’ Raya returned to the room, and she and Pavel busied themselves with plates and cutlery.

  ‘Do we need knives?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the darkness of my hideout I scrawled notes with a pencil on a small notepad and strained to hear every word. Does he know? I asked myself. Does Pavel know?

  Over their meal Kirill asked about Raya’s work (a study of similarities between the folk music of Sichuan and the Soviet Asian republics), and she in turn quizzed him about the illness of the Soviet Consul in Shanghai, which was rumoured to be life-threatening. They swapped details of their respective travels from the previous summer: Pavel in Moscow, Raya in Kiev with her sister, and Kirill in London, Washington, Paris and Kiev before returning to Moscow.

  ‘You should have told me you were going to be in Kiev,’ Raya said. ‘My sister and her husband had a dacha by the river, about a half hour from the city.’

  ‘I had only two days there, and barely left the Foreign Ministry. Do you know they have now installed an elevator in that beautiful stairwell? At the old building on Mykhailivska Square? It only has three storeys, for God’s sake! An elevator for only three storeys! Kirichenko is behind it, Khrushchev’s man. A monst
rous thing, and I refused to use it. It is a gilded cage with clanking gates and sagging wires that drags you from the bowels of the building and deposits you at the door of Kirichenko’s office.’

  ‘Is it that you prefer to walk for your health?’ Pavel asked, ‘Or are you afraid someone will cut the wires and you will drop three storeys to your death?’

  ‘Both; neither. What disturbs me is that it looks like a prison cell, and I have watched people as they ride up and down. They stop talking to each other and a look of vacancy comes into their eyes, as if their souls had taken the stairs while their bodies take the elevator. That is what scares me.’

  ‘You are very amusing, Kirill,’ Raya said. ‘Here, drink.’

  ‘To vacancy,’ Pavel said. ‘To elevation. Bud’mo.’

  ‘Bud’mo.’

  My knees and back started to ache. My small cavity filled with the smell of their cigarettes and I held my hand over my mouth and nose, closed my eyes to stop them watering, and lay in the darkness listening. Does he know? I asked myself again and again.

  ‘Tell us more about your travels in the United States, Kirill’ said Pavel. ‘What news? Did they turn you into a capitalist?’

  ‘Indeed, not. It is too hot there, too humid, at least in Washington. I do not understand how they get anything done. Who has the energy to engage in free enterprise when drenched in sweat? Give me London, where it rained without ceasing, or Berlin, where the leaves are falling everywhere,’ Kirill replied. ‘As for my mission, it is accomplished for the time being.’

  ‘And my friend, Yudin, in Beijing? How is he?’

  ‘Ah, that is a different matter altogether, I’m afraid,’ Kirill said. ‘Yudin is panicking, let me be frank. The ground slips away beneath him, and he fears he will be replaced and sent home in disgrace.’

  ‘What has he done?’

  Kirill lit a cigarette, and then, remembering himself, offered them to his hosts, lighting theirs with the glowing end of his.

  ‘He has soured relationships with the leadership there,’ he said. ‘We have it on good intelligence that the PLA is planning to invade the channel islands off Taiwan. We don’t know when, exactly. That’s probably as far as they will go, since their purpose is merely to bring the US Seventh Fleet into play.’

  ‘And who does that help?’

  ‘Not us, anyway. It is well known that the Americans have Matador missiles in Taiwan. One of them is almost certainly trained on our little gathering here – on this table, on me, on this bottle of Moskovskaya. Invading Jinmen and Mazu is a ploy, of course. Mao wants to force Khrushchev to cancel the trip to Washington I have been so carefully preparing.’

  ‘And what is our next move . . .’ Pavel began.

  ‘I will say nothing more,’ Kirill said. ‘Change the subject, please.’

  ‘Why?’ Pavel said. ‘I know Yudin well. He and I have been friends for years. Call him; ask him; give him my regards.’

  There was an extended silence in the room below me, and I imagined what wordless exchanges were going on, what narrowing of eyes and fingering of glass-rims, what staring at the colourless liquid in the vodka bottle.

  ‘While you were in Kiev,’ Raya began, ‘nursing a phobia for elevators, I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Feodosia, where I witnessed a terrible sight: a large dog – a German Shepherd – that had been chained to a post at the side of the road, and had somehow twisted the chain around so that it cut into the flesh of its neck and started to draw blood. It was just off the town square, in broad daylight. The poor thing was writhing in pain, pulling and twisting and yelping, and making its situation worse.’

  ‘I thought Kirill said to change the subject,’ Pavel moaned.

  ‘And nobody attempted to release it, or to find the owner,’ Raya went on, ‘but instead a group of people, ordinary people – housewives, young couples, old men – simply stood and watched as it slowly bled to death. Even as it started to spasm, nobody went to find a gun or a hammer to put the poor beast out of its misery.’

  ‘And your point is, my dear?’ Pavel asked.

  ‘Perhaps the dog represents humanity,’ Kirill said, ‘and we witness its death throes, without a thought to take action to save it.’

  ‘And what did you do, my dear?’ Pavel asked. ‘As an intelligent observer, as an intellectual, a zhi-shi-fen-zi. Did you, my one true love, did you release the dog from its suffering?’

  Raya did not seem insulted by the question, and answered simply, ‘I did nothing. I too did nothing.’ The two men were silent. After a while Raya continued, ‘I did nothing because I had been watching my nephews and nieces play in the river that day, and asking myself if they will ever be my age; if they will ever see their twentieth birthday, living as they do on a military base, their school-house no doubt in the cross-hairs of some missile waiting in a dark wood somewhere in Germany or Turkey.’

  ‘I think I might have intervened, nevertheless,’ Pavel said. ‘I have no faith in our ability to build weapons and deny ourselves their use. But I would have found a rock and staved in the dog’s skull. A rock is a fine weapon.’

  ‘You are a good man, Pavel,’ said Kirill, starting to laugh. ‘Let me pour the next round, and let us drink to men such as Pavel, and hope that you survive the blast when it comes and that you have a large rock on hand to use on the rest of us. The last and greatest heroes of mankind, that is what such men will be, staggering from door to door, blood-stained rock in hand.’

  ‘Do you deserve to die, Kirill?’ Pavel said.

  Kirill’s laughter subsided quickly, and he sighed. ‘I am implicated, my friend, like all diplomats,’ he said. ‘Just months ago I was in Beijing with our scientists and generals, handing over the first of the plans and specifications to their scientists and generals. My fingerprints are on the treaty. My image is in the commemorative photograph, third on the left, standing behind the Great Man himself. Soon the middle kingdom will be in the middle once again.’

  ‘And my wife?’ Pavel asked, dropping his voice. ‘Tell me: does she deserve to have her skull staved in too?’

  ‘No,’ Kirill said, his voice lightening. ‘Not at all. Like all women, she deserves to be spared any suffering.’ There was a clink of glasses, then another and – after a pause – a third. Then the three of them laughed, first Raya, then Kirill, and finally Pavel.

  ‘Drink up,’ Raya said. ‘Enough of this silly talk. I am going to bed, and you, Kirill, have a driver waiting outside in the cold.’

  *

  Madame Huang almost hugged me the following morning after I had relayed the conversation in detail. Was I sure that the word ‘treaty’ had been used? And that Kirill had clearly referred to an agreement between the Soviet Union and China? Which islands were we about to invade? And could I explain once more the story about the dying dog? In her view, it did not make any sense. The dog and its owner were both stupid. How could its death be a lesson?

  As she rose to dismiss me I asked her once again when I might be able to return home to visit my father. ‘Be patient,’ she said. ‘I had word yesterday that your father is responding well to treatment. But it is too soon for you to leave us; your work is too important.’

  ‘You had word?’ I said. ‘A telegram? A letter? Can I see it?’

  ‘Just word,’ she said, sharply. ‘Trust me.’

  Throughout the winter I made my nightly pilgrimage down the fire escape, and observed the silent routines of Pavel and Raya. Although Kirill remained in the city, he did not return to the apartment on the third floor. Pavel and Raya had descended into their taciturn ways, and if Madame Huang had asked me to I could have written down their conversation verbatim on one small sheet of paper. I started to the read the Shanghai Liberation Daily every day, looking for reports of treaties and exchanges between China and the Soviet Union. As the months passed I read about how Tibet had been liberated from itself, how Taiwan was handed over to the Americans as an island fortress, and how India stubbornly resisted the great sweep of socialist h
istory over the Xinjiang-Tibet Road through the Kunlun Mountains. As the year progressed, the newspaper also covered the successful testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the launching of the Sputnik satellite, and the journey of Laika the dog into orbit on a Soviet satellite. But there was no mention of any Sino-Soviet treaty. (Although my expectations of the Chinese press were misplaced, the treaty did exist, and its substance – the provision by the Soviet Union of plans for the construction of nuclear reactors and weapons, and the construction of a nuclear testing site in Lop Nur, Xinjiang, in exchange for the supply of Chinese uranium from new mines in Hunan and Jiangxi – became known only after it had been rescinded in 1960.)

  One thing did catch my eye, though. While visiting Moscow, Mao delivered a speech in which he predicted that socialism would survive a nuclear war. ‘If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died,’ Mao said, ‘the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. On the debris of a dead imperialism, the victorious socialist people would create very swiftly a civilisation a thousand times superior to the capitalist system and a truly beautiful future for themselves.’ The speech struck the Communist world dumb. The Chinese press reported it without comment, as a self-evident truth.

  10. The Year of Miracles

  In January of 1958, the Shanghai Liberation Daily began to report the occurrence of miracles. ‘The people have taken to organising themselves along military lines,’ the paper said, ‘working with militancy, and leading a collective life. This has raised the political consciousness of the five-hundred million peasants still further. The establishment of people’s communes, where industry, agriculture, exchange, culture, education and military affairs merge into one, is the fundamental policy to guide the peasants to accelerate socialist construction, complete the building of socialism ahead of time, and carry out the gradual transition to communism.’