The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  When it had ceased I caught the conductor’s eye once more and struck the first note of the second Romance. And although my audience heard me play Beethoven, in the key of F major, in some other part of my mind I had slipped through a wall, and was again playing Bach’s double violin concerto, in the key of D minor. I felt once again the snaking presence of David Oistrakh’s violin around mine, and then as the melody unfolded I stepped through a curtain into a timeless world where I was standing on a high ridge, and music was flowing past me and through me, pressing around my form like a cold wind rising up from a vast dark plain behind me, from a great abyss of feeling – my own, and that of my parents, and Kasimir and Piroshka and Dmitri Dmitrievich, and so many others with them – and the only outlet for that feeling was the curved soundbox of my violin, of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. I sensed that it was inexhaustible, that I could keep playing for my whole lifetime and it would never be spent. The music carried me forward, bar by bar, theme by theme, and I felt that I was playing something more than what either composer had written, something universal: the music of the turning world. But it was not endless, indeed, as Director Ho had said, music is not endless or infinite, but instead carries within itself the promise that once it has played itself out, no matter if it takes decades or centuries or millennia, it will resolve itself once more into silence. In that moment it occurred to me that if I ever spoke again with Director Ho I would tell him that I had fulfilled his wish for music and China, that I had played out in its fullness that vast but ultimately finite domain of melody and harmony. I would tell him that I had heard the song that the Emperor Huangdi had tuned his lyre to centuries ago in that high mountain glade, and that now I could, if he wished, restore the yellow bell pitch to China. For as my performance in Turin came to its end, I realised that I had heard the song of the phoenix as a young child without knowing what it was, that I had learned it by heart and carried it within me all these years. It was the simple note sounded by the bell on my father’s bicycle, the new bell that he bought after his stroke, the key into which he would transpose all of his favourite tunes as he rode to work: the key of D, or D minor.

  I lowered my arms and bowed my head, bathed in yellow light, holding Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume by its neck in one hand and my bow, sprouting several loose strands of horsehair, in the other. There was silence, and for a moment I thought that some miracle had occurred – that I would look up to find that my audience had aged thirty years during the quarter hour of my performance and were now staring, dumbstruck, at the wizened skin of their hands and faces. But in the next moment I was enveloped by a waterfall of noise, a roaring column of bright light and sound that weighed down upon my head and shoulders and obliterated all sense. I felt the air compress me from all sides, forcibly emptying my lungs, and, finding myself unable to breathe, I ran from the stage and leaned against a wall, gasping. Then I felt a cool breeze behind me, and turning around saw an open fire-door at the end of a short corridor. It led out onto the adjacent alleyway, and I saw through a stone arch onto an empty piazza whose cobblestones were carpeted in a luminous blue moonlight. I ran to my dressing room, laid my violin in its case, and put on my coat. I threw open Ruan’s suitcase and was relieved to find two diplomatic passports, mine and his, lying on top of his folded clothes. I stuffed my passport into the pocket of my coat and picked up my violin and my suitcase. Then I turned back and seized Ruan’s passport as well and made my way along the corridor towards the door.

  The audience was getting restless. They had been clapping for several minutes, and yet I had not reappeared. It would surely be only a few more seconds before someone came looking for me. I turned and walked out into the alley.

  *

  I did not sleep during the journey to Marseille, nor on the train I caught from there to Paris. I did think of my mother, as Ruan had suggested, although no picture of her came into my mind, nor any of the emotions that I expected to feel. What came to my mind was a disembodied voice (I was not even certain it was hers) repeating to me the proverb she had recited at the beach house near Shanghai the last time I had seen her:

  Nu ren xin, hai di zhen.

  A woman’s heart, a needle at the bottom of the ocean.

  *

  I was the last passenger to disembark at the Gare de Lyon. I walked along the corridors from carriage to carriage, looking out of the windows at the people on the platform, trying to spot an official from the embassy or a member of the gendarmerie. I could see none, and no one tried to stop me as I descended from the train. I found myself on the steps of the station and realised I had nowhere to go. Clearly I could not go to the Conservatory. I had a few friends in the Paris music scene, but I had only ever visited them in the company of Ruan; he had their names and addresses, and since they had been sanctioned by the embassy I could not be sure they would protect me.

  I decided it was best to lie low for a few days; so I checked into a small hotel on the Left Bank – not knowing how I was going to pay my bill, since Ruan allowed me very little money of my own, most of which I had spent on my train tickets – and stayed in my room all day, dreading every footstep on the stairs. I only ventured out at night to find food. I knew that Leon worked at the Opera at nights, so after a few days I thought I would find a vantage point nearby, and wait there until the evening’s performance was finished and try to spot him leaving for home, wherever that was. I found a place behind a pillar on the building opposite the staff entrance, wrapped a coat around myself and waited. I don’t know what happened on the first night. Perhaps he wasn’t working, or perhaps I fell asleep at the wrong moment. But he was there on the second night, and left with a friend at around eleven o’clock. I checked to see that no one was following them, and then shadowed them to a tiny bistro a couple of blocks away.

  I stood outside in the cold for a while, wondering if I should go in. Would they know I was missing? What were their loyalties? I felt sure Leon would help me, but who was the other man? I decided to go in. I decided not to have any choice. The place was dimly lit, and almost empty. Leon noticed me immediately, and he waved to me and beckoned me to his table. He introduced his friend as Thierry, the stage manager, and invited me to dine with them. We ate together and for an hour neither of them said a word about what I was doing there. We talked about Paris and New Zealand and China, with Leon translating my Russian into French for Thierry, and I learned a great deal about Leon: that his first job in Paris had been as an electrician at the Moulin Rouge; that his father was a noted artist in his home country; and that, despite being a Protestant, he attended Mass every week at Notre Dame de Paris. (I remember Thierry objecting strongly to this. ‘Ach, to waste the body of Christ on heretics who presume to drink his blood!’ he proclaimed with a snort. I asked for an explanation and both of them looked at my puzzled expression and then at each other. Leon began to explain to me the doctrine of transubstantiation, how the wafer and wine were transformed into Christ’s flesh and blood by the prayer of the celebrant, but he had not got very far when Thierry leaned over and drunkenly kissed him on both cheeks, saying, ‘Je vous salue, mon frère, pleine de grâce.’ And Leon patted his stomach and said, ‘Pleine de grasse, you mean.’)

  Then Leon ordered some brandy, and as he poured some into a glass for me he said, ‘You’re running away, aren’t you?’ Without waiting for a response, he turned immediately to Thierry and poured him a glass, whispering, ‘Elle veut echapper.’ And Thierry said ‘En effet?’ and looked at me with eyes wide in excitement.

  ‘Yes, I’m trying to,’ I said, ‘but I need some help.’ So the three of us discussed my situation right there in the bistro, as the staff closed up the kitchen and set the tables for the next day’s lunch, and started to turn out the lights. Thierry wrote down the name of an uncle and aunt in Brittany who he was sure would harbour me for as long as I wanted. They had been in the resistance during the war, he explained, and could not turn away anyone who was hiding from authority. I don’t know how serious the plan was, b
ut Leon took down the directions to their farm and assured me he would get me there within twenty-four hours.

  Then we walked to my hotel. Thierry lived in a street just beyond it, so he accompanied us most of the way. The concierge was not very happy to see me bringing a man up to my room at one-thirty in the morning, but Leon waved a small white name card in front of her face and muttered, ‘Sécurité diplomatique’ and she let us pass. I asked him why he did that, and he said he had seen it in a movie. I looked at the card in his hand. On it was printed the name of my violin teacher with the crest of the Paris Conservatoire. When we got to my room, I started packing my things. I asked Leon if he trusted Thierry not to call the police, and he said, ‘I don’t think it matters now.’ I looked up to find him at the window, looking down onto the street below. ‘I think our friend from the embassy has been following us.’ And sure enough, there was Ruan standing under a lamp-post looking up at the hotel. As we watched, he crossed the street towards us. ‘Keep the chain on the door,’ Leon said, and he slipped out of the room.

  I waited for a few minutes, listening for the noise of some kind of fracas downstairs. But nothing happened. Then there was a gentle knock on the door, and, thinking it was Leon, I opened it, leaving the chain on. It was Ruan.

  ‘Welcome back to China,’ he said, pressing his weight against the door.

  ‘But there’s still a chain between us,’ I said, pushing back, ‘and I have decided to go away.’

  ‘Where to?’ he said.

  ‘Anywhere that isn’t the centre of the universe,’ I said.

  I could see only half of Ruan’s face. His cheek was flushed and his eye was watery, and for a moment I thought he might offer to help me escape. He had come alone, after all, and would not by himself have been able to manhandle me back to the embassy.

  ‘But you are in danger, Comrade,’ he said. ‘Don’t you realise who’ – and at that his eyes turned up into his head and he slumped against the door, his face sliding down the crack until he was jerked away from behind, and I heard a series of thumps as he fell onto the carpet of the landing.

  When I opened the door Leon was down on his knees beside Ruan. In one hand he held a Parisian cobblestone. ‘I got him! I got him!’ he was saying excitedly. Then he appeared to embrace him, putting his ear to Ruan’s chest to make sure he was breathing. ‘He’s alive, thank God,’ Leon said, ‘but he’s out cold. It’ll be at least an hour before he wakes up.’ I didn’t ask Leon how he knew that. I guess he had seen it in a movie too.

  We left Ruan in the hallway and made our escape, walking briskly down towards the Seine, arguing about which station the trains for Brittany left from. I could tell from the spring in his step that Leon was delighted to be running away with an exotic woman, and, I have to say, a part of me was delighted to be the exotic woman he was running away with. The other part of me felt guilty, because I was running away from my responsibility to the masses, to my people, to my mother, and yet, like Xian Xinghai in the movie, my body felt lighter, as if I had somehow stepped through into a world where gravity was lessened. The burden that had weighed on me like a cloak of lead since I was a child had been removed, and now I was able to float unencumbered into the air.

  Then, as we were starting to cross the Pont Neuf, there were some footsteps behind us and Leon went sprawling forward onto the road. It was Ruan again. He pounced onto Leon’s back and began hitting him (like a diplomat rather than a spy, I suppose, because Leon easily managed to shake him off), and the two of them struggled and punched while I, to my shame, picked up my suitcase and my violin and stood there watching. They rolled across the flagstone footpath, more like overgrown schoolboys playing rough than a representative of the East wrestling with a representative of the West for the privilege of walking away with me. I stood over them as they fought wordlessly, and I remember vignettes from amidst the blurry soup of their bodies and coats: Ruan’s fingers splayed out across Leon’s cheek; Leon seizing Ruan’s belt buckle and hoisting him off the ground; and one of Ruan’s shoes skittering into the gutter and coming to rest upside down in a puddle, from which I immediately rescued it. A taxi swung its headlights around a nearby corner and paused momentarily, casting onto the bridge’s solid handrail the flickering shadows of the two men, which then merged into a single shadow flighting with itself. I waited for the sound of car doors opening, of shouts, of offers of help, but nothing came. The taxi turned away. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Maybe I should try to stop them; maybe Ruan actually wants to help; maybe he believes Leon wants to harm me.’ And before I did anything with my thoughts the two men struggled to their feet and split asunder. I rushed forward and interposed myself and we became a six-legged animal – pushing against each other, hip grinding on hip, arms and fists swinging, fingers clutching, swaying together, slamming against the stone rail of the Pont Neuf – and then . . . I was falling through space, with Ruan beside me, the air rushing past my face and reaching its cold fingers into the crevices of my clothing like a pickpocket. I landed with my hips on something soft and my shoulder on something hard and flinty, and rolled face first into the river. The cold was shocking. The water enveloped my legs and torso, pulling me into the flow. My hands closed around a large flat rock which wobbled under my weight, and I looked up to the riverbank. Leon was racing down the steps towards me, carrying my violin and suitcase. He put them down on the tow-path, stepped into the water and clasped my right hand. As he pulled me up onto dry land a pain shot through my arm and into my shoulder and my chest. I collapsed onto the embankment unable to breathe until I rolled onto my left side. Leon was standing above me. ‘Oh, Christ!’ I heard him say.

  Ruan had fallen face-down. His legs were in the water, but his upper half was on a broken slab of concrete that sloped down into the river. I couldn’t see any movement. Then, as his clothes became waterlogged, the river started to tug Ruan into its flow. Fraying ropes of water wrapped themselves around his limbs and torso; I saw the water turn him over, open his raincoat and pull at his shirt, then one arm went under and he slipped sideways and disappeared. Leon jumped into the river, plunged his hands into the water and caught hold of Ruan by the armpits, but he had no footing and the effort of pulling Ruan upwards simply drew both of them in deeper. Leon fell backwards and released his hold, and as the river pulled them both towards the faster water in the centre of the channel I saw Leon’s arms flailing – whether to save himself or to reach Ruan I could not tell. Moments later they were both gone.

  I got to my feet, seized my case and, with great difficulty and pain, positioned my violin under my left arm and began to run along the tow-path, scanning the surface of the dark river, calling out to Leon and Ruan. After a hundred metres or so I found Leon sitting on the riverbank with his head in his hands, moaning to himself repeatedly, ‘Oh Jesus, oh shit.’ I knelt down beside him. ‘Oh Jesus, oh shit,’ he said again.

  I knelt beside Leon for several minutes, listening to him shivering and muttering his pointless little mantra under his breath. Then suddenly I was possessed by an idea. I opened my suitcase and took from it only my father’s notebook and my pouch of letters, leaving the two diplomatic passports tucked amongst my clothes. I closed it again, swung my left arm back and threw the suitcase into the river. I pulled off my coat and my shoes and threw them in too. And I was about to throw Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in, except Leon arose from his stupor and grabbed it from my hands.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘I’m faking my own death,’ I said. ‘I’m drowning myself in the Seine.’

  I wrenched the violin case from his grasp, stepped into the river and released it into the flow, standing back and watching it float away, as one watches a child riding free for the first time on a bicycle. I watched it catch the water’s first ridge, ride into a shallow trough, turn on its axis and spin gaily through one eddy and into another, and then finally skate out onto the powerful thrust of the river’s core, where it wobbled and straightened and righted itself
, and then gathered speed until it was lost from sight.

  *

  So my years of happiness began on a train bound for Nantes, sitting in wet clothes between two provincial matrons, fashioning for myself a makeshift sling for my sore arm, wondering if, like Kasimir’s, it might be permanently damaged, and indeed embracing the notion of a wound that would end my playing days. (As it turned out I had suffered only severe bruising, and it was other circumstances that kept me from playing the violin for several years.) Leon sat opposite me in the train carriage, grinning from time to time. As for Ruan, they fished his body from the river the following morning, and found my empty suitcase and my coat and one shoe half a kilometre further downstream. We read about it in the papers once we were safely in Nantes with Thierry’s uncle and aunt: ‘Body identified as Chinese diplomat’. And then, the next day, ‘Chinese violinist missing, feared drowned in Seine’. One paper speculated on some kind of crime of passion, a doomed affair between Ruan and me. Another had it on good authority that we were both trying to defect.

  For the next year Leon and I lived as fugitives in the French provinces, working in small towns and on farms, moving frequently, enjoying the very act of surviving. We had our secret codes and emergency meeting places and our stashes of emergency cash. We rehearsed our alibis, invented histories and tragedies and comedies, and as our circumstances required that we pose as man and wife we became just that. I wish I could say that we uncovered some depth of emotion, but in the end it was only our shared knowledge that held us together.