The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  I was pregnant with Miro when we gave ourselves up to a police chief in Lyon, who held us in the cells while he placed phone calls to Paris, then took our statements and, eyeing the lump at my belly censoriously, escorted us around the corner to the office of his cousin, a notaire, who duly married us. Somehow it emerged through discussions in Paris amongst diplomats and officials of various departments – discussions in which we took no part – that the obvious place for our child to be born was Berlin.

  *

  The clock said eight-forty. Miro would call again at nine o’clock. This has been our arrangement for years, to call every hour on the hour until a connection is made. I rose from my chair and took an LP from the shelf, Shostakovich’s second piano concerto (too gushy, too beautiful to be by Shostakovich, one would think, unless there is some hidden code or purpose or message within it; even so I confess to liking it). I laid it on the turntable and lifted the needle arm carefully to position it in the shiny groove between the first and second tracks. As the music began to play I walked to the window and looked out over the city.

  In the darkness the fronds of the Canary Island palms rattled for a moment and then fell silent. A ship was nosing its way silently into the inner folds of the harbour, lights hanging like magnesium flares from its dark flanks, and as the fronds shifted in the breeze they hid the ship for a while and then revealed it again, each time slightly closer to its destination.

  Another plane sprang from behind Mount Victoria, and I found it strange that, despite all the power and fury of its engines, I could hear nothing other than the music in the room, the plane seeming to float through the air, propelled by the power of a piano and an orchestra. My thoughts floated with it. Music, I reflected, is indeed the language of doubt and of doubters. At least that was so during my era in China, when no other language was available to us.

  I thought now of mythical birds, of the phoenix and the phoenix song. Of the phantoms that entrance us, that we try to grasp and to make our own, the elusive things that we must go to the mountain to find, that are passed from generation to generation through characters written with a fingertip on the palm of a hand. I thought of the ten thousand planes between my father’s finger and thumb, and of poor, sweet Ruan, sliding into the cold embrace of the Seine, and then, in turn, of my family and my friends, of the living and the dead. And as the hand of the clock moved towards the hour, I tried what I suspect most of us try to do on occasion: to assemble the life we have so far lived, and all the people we have known, into one harmonious sequence, a song unfolding in time – lost, found, and once again lost.

  Acknowledgements

  The Asia Foundation of New Zealand unwittingly planted the seed that grew into this book by awarding me a fellowship to study Mandarin in China in 1995. The Foundation’s chief executive at the time, Peter Harris, arranged for me to be a visiting scholar at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences in the city of Harbin, where, he assured me, the dialect is pure, the people friendly and if any language other than Chinese is heard it is most likely to be Russian.

  Although the main characters in the book are fictional, I have sought to create an accurate historical setting for them. Kyleigh Hodgson at Victoria University Press has worked assiduously to ensure that, although the central events in the plot did not happen, they could have happened more or less as described.

  Readers are urged to explore the historical records for themselves. For those with time on their hands, Roderick MacFarquhar’s three-volume work, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1973–1997) is unparalleled, filling out the detail of the larger story told in works such as Jonathon Spence’s The Search for Modern China (Norton, 1990), a copy of which came with me to Harbin. My major source for the fascinating story of classical music in China was Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music became Chinese, by Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai (Algora Publishing, 2004).

  The life of Dmitri Shostakovich, and in particular his attitude towards the Stalinist regime and its cultural policies, has sparked vigorous debate, especially since the publication in 1979 of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, which purported to be Shostakovich’s memoirs ‘as related to and edited by’ Volkov. My Shostakovich clearly owes a great deal to Volkov, and to other writers who have portrayed a composer at odds with the state apparatus that ruled his life. For those who want the facts without the polemic, I would recommend Ian MacDonald’s The New Shostakovich (Pimlico, 2006).

  Finally I am immensely grateful for the advice and encouragement provided by Bill Manhire and Kathryn Walls of Victoria University, the late Nigel Cox, and my classmates in the International Institute of Modern Letters Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2002.

  A note on the pronunciation

  of Chinese words

  Throughout the text I have used the Pinyin system of romanisation to render Chinese words into English. This is the system used in mainland China, and while it is generally easy for English speakers to use, some of its more difficult renderings come up frequently in the novel and merit some explanation.

  The letter ‘X’ is pronounced as a very light ‘sh’ sound. Thus, the protagonist’s surname, Xiao, is pronounced ‘Shee-ow’, and the name of the Chinese composer Xian Xinghai is pronounced ‘Shee-an Shee-ing-high’.

  The letters ‘Zh’ – as in Zhou Enlai and Zhu Shaozen – signify a soft ‘j’ sound, as in the French ‘je’, but with the tongue resting on the roof of the mouth.

  The letter ‘Z’ by itself (as in Mao Zedong) is pronounced ‘dz’.

  The letter ‘C’ (as in Feng Cean) is pronounced ‘ts’.

  Finally, in case the reader needs to be reminded, Chinese names begin with the surname, followed by one or more given names, which are sometimes run together as a single word in English.

  The Director of the Shanghai Conservatory, Ho Luting, is a special case. Pinyin would normally render his surname as He, pronounced ‘her’. However, to avoid confusion with the English pronoun ‘he’ I have opted to use Ho instead, following in this one instance the Wade-Giles romanisation system commonly used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.