For the duration of the Civil War my father’s duties meant he was for the most part absent from my life. From time to time, he would appear, unannounced, at the apartment, always producing from his satchel some gift of food – a jar filled with millet, a leathery knot of bean curd wrapped in cloth, three or four potatoes or some greens in a bag – and would stay for an hour or two. He would expect me to play for him whatever music I was learning, and Piroshka and I would oblige. Her hands would dance across the piano, and she would hiss through her teeth whenever she struck B-flat above middle C (for it had slipped out of tune and the only piano tuner she trusted had left for Shanghai the year I was born). I would stand at her shoulder and play, turning frequently to catch my father’s eye. He would listen with his eyes closed, nodding his head with the music, and then would open one eye to make sure we had finished, before clapping loudly. I learned quickly that, although he loved to listen to music, and could hardly believe his luck in having a child who was musically talented, he himself was not capable of telling a good performance from one that was merely competent. Several times I remember turning to bask in his enthusiastic applause knowing in my heart that I had neglected my phrasing, and slurred notes that should have been sharp like pins. If Kasimir was present on these occasions he would slap his thigh by way of applauding, but his eyebrows would be raised and I knew to expect a meticulous critique as soon as my father left.
During one visit my father produced a length of string from his pocket, laid it along the top of my violin, then folded it in half and got me to place my finger on the violin string at the exact halfway point. ‘Perhaps your Auntie has explained this to you,’ he said, with a glance at Piroshka, ‘but every string on a stringed instrument covers two octaves – that is an unalterable mathematical truth – and so the note that is produced if you play halfway along the string should be exactly one octave higher than the note that is produced if you play the string without touching it. Try it and see.’ I plucked the string twice, and my father’s theorem was proved.
‘And if you divide the length of the string in half again you will find it plays a note that is in harmony with the first note. And if you continue to divide by half, every note made will be in harmony. And what is more, you will find the same happens if you divide the length of the string by three. You see, music is simply the mathematics of the ear. All notes on the scale rest in a precise mathematical relationship to each other. There is a name for this, but I do not remember it. Do you know what it is?’
I looked to Piroshka who was mending clothes by the fire. ‘Garmonicheskiy ryad,’ she said, without looking up from her needle. ‘But don’t expect me to say it in Chinese.’
‘Garmonicheskiy ryad,’ I relayed. ‘We don’t know if there is a Chinese word too.’
‘How could there not be,’ my father assured me, ‘when it was Confucius who discovered it, and taught it to the Greek, Pythagoras?’ He took the violin from me and turned it over in his hands. ‘With a few measuring tools and the right formulae I could describe in precise mathematical terms the sound waves this violin emits. The dimensions of the box, the way the strings vibrate, how the sound bounces around inside before it comes out, that is all I would need. I could give you a compound formula for it, although I am a busy man and it would take me a long time to work it out.’
‘And a lot of paper to write it down,’ muttered Piroshka, without looking up.
My father handed the violin back to me. ‘Have you ever been up onto the roof at night? If you listen carefully you will hear the music of the stars and planets in their orbits. Confucius listened to it all the time, and I have heard it myself on rare occasions when I was at Yan’an with Marshall Lin Biao. You need a clear night with no enemy bombers about. Even then it takes a very good ear to hear it. Perhaps China will develop a machine for listening to this music.’
After my father had gone, Piroshka sat at the piano. ‘Draw a stave,’ she said, ‘and write down this melody.’ She struck a key. ‘What note is that?’ she asked.
‘F,’ I said.
‘Close. It’s E,’ she said. ‘Write it down. And what is this next note?’
‘A-flat,’ I said.
‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Now I will play the melody slowly, and you write down what you hear.’
The melody was no more than a few bars long. When I had finished transcribing it Piroshka looked at my work, and turned a couple of quavers into semi-quavers, then drew a small tick at the end of the stave. ‘Good. Now I want you to draw three more staves, and I want you to do three things that your father would approve of. First, I want you to turn the tune upside down, so that instead of going up a third at the start, you go down a third, then down to the fifth, and so on. Then I want you to take the original melody and write it backwards. And thirdly I want you to write the upside down version and the backwards version on the same stave. You have ten minutes.’
She returned to her mending while I worked. I found the exercise harder than I had thought. The clocks above the mantelpiece thudded mechanically, and I felt my ten minutes running down, tock by tock. When my time was up, Piroshka turned one eyebrow towards me and said, ‘You are finished, are you?’
I nodded. But instead of checking my work, she went straight to the piano and sat down. ‘Tell me if this is what you have written,’ she said, and proceeded to play exactly what I had in front of me: the original melody, the inverted version, the melody reversed, and the combination of inverted and reversed melody which turned out to be in perfect counterpoint. I followed each note, and at the end laughed and clapped.
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘It is by Bach, and when Bach was in a mathematical frame of mind this is how he wrote music,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘We should arrange for your father to meet Bach. I am sure they would have a lot to talk about. Now tell me, do you think the piece is more beautiful because you know how it was written? Because you understand its inner mathematics?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me the answer.’
‘There is no answer,’ she said. ‘I only know this: to be a good musician you must not play only from your head, nor must you play only from your heart. This is what some people say, but it is an absurd romanticism. Like everyone else you play with your bones and your muscles and your nerves. You play from the base of your spine.’ She touched my lower back with her hand. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘This is where all of these meet: bones, muscles and nerves. This is where you play from. Is there any mathematics here? Perhaps we will ask your mother to bring home a scalpel some night and we can cut you open and see.’
*
On his next visit my father brought a rolled-up map of the city which he spread out on the table, holding down its curling edges with two small marrows, a roll of dried bean curd and a bag of beans. ‘See?’ he said. ‘I have divided the city into six districts in the interests of public order and hygiene.’ He indicated thick pencilled lines which made the city look something like the diagram on the back wall of the kosher butcher’s shop – a carcass divided into various cuts of meat. ‘Each district in turn has been divided into fifty-eight neighbourhoods, and each neighbourhood has around fourteen thousand people. And we have organised seventeen thousand citizens into night watch self-defence teams.’ As he spoke he drew from his breast pocket a pencil stub and wrote each of the numbers on a blank area of the map. (My father already shared the Party’s faith in the innate gravity of large numbers, especially those in excess of ten thousand, a ‘myriad’ in classical Chinese, the largest number that the ancient mathematicians thought could be contemplated.) ‘Each neighbourhood can be sealed off so not even a mouse can escape,’ he went on. ‘Soon we will have registered every citizen. No one will be left out.’
Public hygiene provided my father with a wealth of numbers, and these he also added to his map as he spoke; numbers for the repatriation of Japanese civilians, for the disposal of night soil, the rationing of food, and the detention of carriers of syphilis and typhoid and cholera. Next, my father declared, indeed that very night – and here he drew a circle around the infamous Pingkangli neighbourhood – there would be a war on brothels and pimps. And so early the next morning an army of purgation fell upon Pingkangli. Police armed with whistles and truncheons, and nurses trained in the arts of dosing and restraint, descended upon the Virtuous Wind Inn, the Red Eagle Inn, the Peach Garden Bookhouse and the Heavenly Happiness Hall. The raid was a failure. There had been a tip off, and my father’s net landed a meagre catch of ageing syphilitics and one surprised brothel-keeper who was convinced he had bought protection from a high official. Although the premises in Pingkangli were closed down the trade continued elsewhere. A municipal edict appeared on posters throughout the city, and rewards were offered for information leading to the arrest of pimps and prostitutes and their clients. My father – foolishly, he realised later – required each of the fifty-eight neighbourhoods to root out two brothels apiece. Within a week all of them had obliged. Flushed with success, he asked for two more; and that quota was also met. At first he was delighted; but when the tally of underground brothels reached five hundred, and the police petitioned him to expand Xiangfeng Prison, he called the campaign to a halt, and discovered to his dismay that the cells were filled not with whores, brothel-keepers and pimps, but with small-time gangsters, displaced Korean traders, alcoholics, imbeciles, neighbourhood misanthropes and homosexuals.
In spring the Nationalists mounted a massive counter-attack and all matters of hygiene were set aside. The Communist forces, more used to fighting as guerrillas than as a conventional army, were expelled from the city of Changchun and pushed back across the Songhua River. On my father’s next visit he complained of back pain and would not sit. Instead, he leaned on the fireplace like a drooping flower, and admitted that there had been ‘myriads’ of dead. My mother was sent to work in a field hospital to the south of the city, once again performing amputations and, exhausting her supplies of ether, resorting to opium and then to the barely effective mandrake root. And when I did finally climb to the roof of the apartment building, on a hot night in summer, it was not to listen to the music of the spheres but to witness the distant flashes of artillery fire in the night sky and to feel the heavy thuds through my feet.
The siege continued for six months, and then Marshall Lin Biao made his famous counterattack, crossing the frozen Songhua and attacking the Nationalists in their winter quarters. The battle lines crawled south, each day another few metres, another few hundred dead, until the combatants reached the railway junction at Siping. My father described the attack by 40,000 of our troops. ‘Si wan,’ he repeated, ‘four myriads, and a myriad dead on the other side,’ as he unloaded wizened mushrooms and tubers from his pockets onto our table. He had brought my mother back from the front. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, the bones protruding from her elbows and collarbone. I helped her to remove her clothing, which was encrusted with brown slime, and watched her burn it all in a brazier in the lot behind our apartment. Then I watched as Piroshka took a razor and a basin and shaved my mother’s head, and gathered her hair in the basin and took it out to the brazier as well. By the time Piroshka returned my mother was lying on her side in bed, motionless, her eyes open, but saying nothing, dismissing me with a curt flick of her eyes when I attempted to speak to her,. When I returned with some food for her she was curled up like a foetus, so still that I had to hold my finger gingerly to her ribs to check that she was breathing. I undressed and got into bed beside her. For the whole of that night I felt I was sleeping with a ghost.
After the victory at Siping the war grew more distant. The night flashes and rumbling never returned. But by then my parents had another challenge to deal with: an outbreak of bubonic plague. Where it came from was a mystery at the time, but history now traces it to the rats and fleas raised by Japanese researchers in Unit 731 and then released, rather than destroyed, after the Japanese surrender. The disease had been incubating in sewers, basements and garbage dumps, and in the spring of 1947 it began to spread through the city, claiming first the labourers, hawkers, porters, and unemployed droshky drivers, and all those who wedged themselves and their belongings into the city’s crevices and ruins. Neighbourhoods were sealed off immediately, and I saw neither of my parents for the duration of the outbreak. They toured the city together in face masks, overseeing the quarantine, distributing crates of Russian vaccines, supervising mass burials, and issuing ammunition to the neighbourhood watch committees who were manning the barricades around the infected areas of the city.
All road and rail traffic was controlled. School was closed, and we were urged to stay indoors despite the onset of warmer weather. The apartment building on Razyezhaya Street filled up with stray relatives and their children, many of them sleeping in the stairwells and filling our nights with arguing and singing and the bellowing of infants. The rabbi’s widow and her nephew slept in our apartment and repaid us by foraging all day for food. I stayed at the apartment all day and practiced with Piroshka, and soon we gained an audience of plague exiles, who would enter our room without knocking and sit along the walls and the hearth or cluster by the doorway. One of these guests produced a viola, which she played (badly) and another brought out his uncle’s euphonium and asked to join in. Piroshka rolled her eyes at first, but then relented and we improvised on a Bach fugue.
When our morning’s session was over and my fingertips were red and aching and Piroshka closed the lid over the keyboard and called for the rabbi’s widow to light the samovar, Kasimir would regale us with stories about old Harbin or the lives of the great composers and musicians. Perhaps because of the plague and its air of extremity, he decided not to spare us the details of Schubert’s syphilis, or Chopin dying abandoned by his mistress, or Schumann’s failed suicide and madness or Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s troubled homosexuality. Sometimes Piroshka would join in, once she had a large cup of Russian tea in her hands, and she would talk about the great operatic divas she had met. I came to understand that all either died young and tragically or old and forgotten, in any case bereft of some great love (a tenor or conductor or junior prince without the courage to leave wife and children). ‘Great music,’ she declared to our gathering, ‘is what great people make out of great suffering.’ And added, with a laugh and a quick glance out of the window to the silent street, ‘But particularly the suffering they bring upon themselves.’
One of our neighbours was an elderly Manchu woman with a long, noble face, watery dog-eyes, and a top lip which strayed upwards involuntarily as if she were yawning, or snarling, or curling her mouth around an oddly shaped fruit (a sure sign of childhood polio, my mother told me). She would arrive at the apartment at daybreak in order to secure her seat, and when she was finally obliged to leave she would approach me and cup my chin in her hand. ‘Your music chases away the plague,’ she said to me, ‘so stay with us here in this building and play, and we will all be saved.’ I was captivated by the thought, imagining that each time I put down my violin the sickness would begin to roll silently towards our building like a river mist and wash against the risers of the balustrade until I dispersed it with another tune.
The Manchu woman proved to be correct. No one in our building – or indeed within the Bolshoi Prospekt – was affected. However, when the plague was over we discovered that it had killed Wang Taitai, who had been stranded on a visit to her sister, isolated from the rest of the city by armed barricades. Rations were thrown over the barricade, along with chlorinated lime and boric acid to cover the bodies of the newly dead. Of Wang Taitai’s family, only a ten-year-old child survived. My father delivered the news that Wang Taitai’s name had appeared one morning on the list of the dead. The official tally: san wan, three myriads.
I felt secretly guilty. Although I knew Kasimir and Piroshka would never have allowed it, and my parents would never have approved, I felt that I could have walked through the city playing my violin, like the Pied Piper, and saved Wang Taitai and many others – could indeed have chased the plague into the river, where it would have been carried harmlessly to the sea. I could then have turned south to march with our troops, dispersing the Nationalist plague before us. I was simply born too late to save the city, but I promised myself that I would never again pass up an opportunity to serve the masses with my music.
I expressed this ambition to my mother, and instead of dismissing it she turned to me and surveyed me from head to foot, circling around me, lifting my chin with her fingers and squaring my shoulders and straightening my spine. ‘I believe you may be ready,’ she said. ‘Do you agree, Uncle?’ she asked Kasimir, who was nearby. ‘Is she ready to begin performing?’ He pursed his lips, but after a moment nodded in agreement. ‘So you will arrange it?’ she went on. ‘You will prepare her?’ He nodded again.
Shortly afterwards I began to play at the fortnightly meetings of the Harbin Musical Society, which were held in a hall attached to the (by that time defunct) American Baptist Church. My audiences were the regulars, a remnant weak and small, and something of a rogue’s gallery: musty intellectuals and White Russians who had eluded repatriation, sitting on the edges of their chairs, smelling of makhorka tobacco and hair oil, sunk deep within themselves like tortoises, or listening intently, bright-eyed, even slightly manic, with a foot wrapped around the opposite calf or a chin resting on the back of an inwardly turned hand. I found myself at each performance fixing my attention on one of them – a man in a velvet smoking jacket, wearing a monocle; an orthodox priest with a coloured scarf wrapped tightly around his head to alleviate his neuralgia; a younger woman with glossy undulations of thick black hair, whose preferred outfit was pin-striped trousers and a tailored coat, beneath which one could see a waistcoat of green stuff, a silk blouse and a cravat; an old man with swaying jowls, wearing a fez, and holding a lighted cigarette upright between his fingers like a joss stick. I would narrow my eyes until only that person remained in focus, and then play to my chosen audience of one, blocking the others from my mind.
Then one night when Piroshka was not with us Kasimir took me, not to the Musical Society, as he had told her, but to an old working-class area, and down a series of unpaved streets and alleys, though a courtyard hung about with damp washing, to a tiny house with a light in the parlour window and the sound of a violin and a clarinet seeping through the walls. We stepped directly into a small parlour, warm with the smells of beer, sweat, sausage and tobacco, and found it filled with more than a dozen people, adults and children of all ages, sitting or standing around a group of musicians: a small boy playing a violin with only three strings; two older men, both wearing hats (the boy’s father and grandfather, I was to learn), playing respectively a viola and a mandolin; a woman in a baggy dress occasionally contributing a bar or two with a clarinet; and, seated in their midst, a teenage girl with a surly expression on her face heaving a small octagonal concertina to and fro on her knee. They were playing some sort of reel, with an irregular rhythm and tempo, punctuated from time to time with what, to my ear, sounded like false notes, although they were repeated again and again so must have been deliberate. I heard a clicking sound behind me and turned to find a man in a rough jerkin made of sheepskin holding two spoons between his fingers and rattling them in turn against one hip and then against his other hand, held just inches from my ear.
‘Klezmer,’ Kasimir said into my other ear, and any other words of explanation were lost as he was greeted with squeals and hugs and full-lipped kisses by several women. The men nodded to him, the musicians carried on, and despite the cramped conditions an old man and a young child began to dance, caracoling this way and that amongst the sawdust and spittle and beer-spills.
My violin case was taken from me, along with the Brahms I had practiced. I made several lunges to retrieve them, but was held back firmly by the shoulders. A woman opened the case, removed my violin and handed it to the boy in the centre of the room, who swapped it for his three-stringed instrument without hesitation and carried on with the tune, throwing me an appreciative glance. I smiled back, and then found his instrument being forced into my hands, and from across the room Kasimir called to me, ‘Just forget everything I have taught you; forget major and minor, forget your keys and scales and progressions; forget it all and just play.’
And so I learned to play klezmer, with Kasimir shouting instructions for the first few tunes, then leaving me to it after being drawn into the dance by an old woman, who seized his deadened hand and planted it first on her waist and then around her neck and led him around the room. After a while one of the dancers, a tall man with a curled moustache, broke away and, without a word, relieved me of my violin. He started to play it himself, holding it in the crook of his elbow, and I found myself promoted to the dance, spun around in precise turns by the firm, warm hands of a young man whom I guessed to be no more than fourteen, although I was surprised, after several minutes, to find him displaced by a young woman who placed an infant in his arms, pushed him aside with some harsh words, and began to dance with me. ‘His wife,’ Kasimir mouthed to me. ‘And a jealous one at that.’
After an hour or more the dancers began one by one to drop onto chairs. The old woman who had claimed Kasimir announced that she was finished for the evening, and grasped both of his hands and kissed each of his fingers on the second knuckle, before attempting to pass him on to another old woman. Kasimir escaped only by pressing his palm against his chest and feigning an angina attack.
Food began appearing on metal plates, and glasses of vodka and tea, and the noise in the room died down as these were consumed. One by one the band stopped playing until it consisted of just me (reunited with my own violin) and the girl on the concertina. We played on, and I managed, through whispers and nudges, to manoeuvre the tune around to a dance alla zingarese from the end of one of Brahms’s piano quartets, which I played with accelerating tempo and adding in the false klezmer notes I had now learned, enticing the boy violinist, vodka glass in hand, into a solo dance, and drawing from Kasimir the widest of smiles and then a salute as he raised his glass to the ceiling in a silent toast.
Afterwards, as we walked through the cold, darkened streets, Kasimir made me promise not to tell Piroshka where we had been, but when we arrived home she seemed already to know. She sniffed at Kasimir’s coat as she took it from him, her face screwing up in its clatter of lines and plates. ‘Makhorka,’ she muttered to herself. I sensed Kasimir preparing to stage a retreat, but she merely eyed us strangely and gave out a long sigh. ‘I gather you have been taken to meet the klezmorim,’ she said to me, ‘our Ashkenazi heimish at their most pure and free.’
‘I made sure they didn’t put vodka in her tea,’ Kasimir protested.
‘That’s good, but I’m more concerned about what they put in her head,’ Piroshka replied, and she squeezed both my temples between her palms and then hugged my head to her breast and added, ‘. . . or what they removed from it.’ Then she began to laugh quietly, continuing to do so every few minutes as we prepared for bed.
*
Later that month I went with Kasimir and Piroshka to see the movie Eight Thousand Li of Clouds and Moon. It tells the story of Xian Xinghai, China’s first great violinist and the composer of the National Liberation Symphony. In the most memorable scene he attempts to console an audience of soldiers and peasants hiding in a village after the defeat of the Guangzhou Commune, in which his own uncle has been killed. As he begins to play, Xian starts to rise above the earth and, as in a woodcut of some ancient fable, hovers over the startled crowd, making to fly away until one of the soldiers climbs onto the shoulders of a peasant and seizes him by the heel. So long as Xian continues to play he is lighter than air, and the crowd gathers into a circle, the soldiers balancing on the backs of the peasants and tethering him to the earth with their rough hands until he finishes his performance and regains his weight.
That night I dreamt I was flying over the city. My neighbours and schoolmates gathered in groups and pointed at me and called up to me as I hovered and swooped. Then I noticed to my horror that the body of my violin had become my left arm, that my fingers were the keys, and my veins and tendons the strings. I looked to my right and found my hand was gone, and in its place, growing out of the stump of my forearm, was my bow, articulated at the wrist like a single, elongated talon. I was at one with the instrument. And then there was a painful pressure in my foot and I looked down to find that my neighbours had formed a human pyramid whose topmost member had seized me by the ankle. They dragged me down to the ground and tied my foot to a tree and left me there.
*
The summer passed, then autumn, and winter approached again. The news from the front improved week by week. My father reopened the quarantined neighbourhoods, reducing their number by two to fifty-six to take account of the deaths. I arrived home from school one day in November to find both my parents at the apartment – an unusual event for the daytime – and wearing new clothes, made of a deep blue cloth, with sharp creases on the jacket sleeves and the trouser legs, so sharp, in fact, that I recall thinking how diminished my parents looked, as if they had no substance, like the air in the bellows of an accordion, and could now be folded up and inserted into these envelopes of blue.
My father sat forward on a chair, one leg crossed over the other, his foot tucked behind the opposite calf. He looked immensely happy with himself, unable to stop smiling. He was smoking a cigarette and he closed his eyes as he inhaled, with an expression not unlike the one he had when he listened to me play my violin. Then he opened them again, and looked at me, with quiet affection, but without speaking.
My mother stood behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders. ‘The war is over,’ she told me. ‘Soon all of China will be liberated. We are flying to Beijing in an hour. Chairman Mao Zedong will address the people.’ For the first time in years I became aware of the detail of my mother’s appearance. Until now, she had been constantly in motion, always vacating the space she occupied, as her thoughts ran far ahead of her body, diagnosing and treating her next patient, serving the needs of the next person. When she was with me I sensed I only had part of her, a part that was following instructions, implementing plans, while the rest of her – the thinking, feeling spine of her – was engaged elsewhere. So I had not noticed until now that her hair had become thin and was starting to grey at the roots, that her shoulders had settled into a permanent sag, that the skin on her cheeks had become pallid and stained with red creases like a map that is repeatedly folded and unfolded.
My father sang softly to himself between puffs on his cigarette as he waited for my mother to pack her things into a small case. ‘I wish we could take you with us, but there are not enough seats on the plane,’ he said. ‘It is a military plane,’ he said, as if that explained everything. And then, ‘Be sure to practice hard while we are away. China will need violinists to strengthen the morale of the people. We will be away for a week or so. Then when we return we will all be a family at last. We will be happy. We will live in a house together. We will have enough food to eat. All of China will be happy. Everyone under heaven will be happy now.’
‘I am already happy,’ I said.
‘Let me assure you,’ my father said, wagging his index finger at the ceiling, ‘once all of China is united under Mao Zedong thought the happiness you have now will seem in comparison like deepest sadness.’
While I was still pondering this statement my mother re-entered the room and announced that she was ready. She placed her hand on my head, and my father, awkwardly, shook my hand. I noticed a young man waiting by the open door. He took the suitcase from my mother, and the three of them smiled at each other smugly and clattered down the stairs and into a car and were gone.
They returned ten days later, bursting into the apartment in the evening when I was getting ready for bed. My father was carrying a reel of film in a large tin under his arm. My mother threw her suitcase onto the bed and took my hand. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘we are going to watch the newsreel of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen, proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic.’ I dressed quickly and followed my parents down the stairs into the waiting car, noticing that they sat together very close, clasping each other by the hand. During that journey my parents seemed impossibly happy. They laughed at everything the other said. They laughed at what I said, at what the driver said. They laughed until they had to wipe tears from their eyes. My father put his arm around me and crushed me to his ribs. ‘Ah, what bliss to have not one girl, but two,’ he said, and burst out laughing again. I felt a surge of pleasure at the warmth of his embrace, but realised, with a sense of something like fear, that things would never be the same again.
We drove down to the municipal offices, where a crowd of party members had gathered in a large meeting room. That year the Da Leng, the Great Cold, had arrived early, and since my father had refused to relent on his decree that there would be no heating in the city until the middle of November, the room was chilly despite the warmth of many bodies. My father held the reel of film above his head like a trophy as we entered the room and were greeted with cheers. He handed the metal box to the projectionist who quickly threaded the film, and shouted for the lights to be extinguished. The screen remained white for a time, and the wedge of light from the projector illuminated the tendrils of steam rising from our heads as if we were all gently smouldering. For a second a blurry infestation of worm-like stains wriggled in the top corner of the screen and then a series of descending numbers appeared at the centre of a kind of target. We counted them down: ‘wu – si – san – er – yi.’ The screen and the room went black momentarily, and then, with the sound of a strangled fanfare, white characters emerged out of the fog of a black background – ‘Victory for the Masses! China awakes to a new dawn!’
Suddenly I was in Beijing. There was a crowd, the biggest I had ever seen, delirious with excitement, waving banners with big bold characters written on them. A woman’s voice was describing the gathering – how many delegates there were from Gansu and from Liaoning, how many peasants, how many intellectuals, how many bourgeois – and reading out what was written on the banners:
‘Celebrate the victory of Mao Zedong and Zhu De!’
‘The nation says thankyou to the People’s Liberation Army!’
‘All of China’s minorities welcome the victory of the Communist Party!’
‘Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’
For each banner, a smiling face, and a wave to the camera. And then a roar of welcome as a company of the People’s Liberation Army marched into the square, walking in time, but with the syncopated tempo of comrades dancing, rather than the unanimous, metronomic swing of the parade ground.
The troops turned to salute the line of figures on the top of Tiananmen, and the camera panned along the faces. I felt my mother’s warm breath as she whispered the names into my ear: Liu Shaoqi, Mao Zedong, Peng Zhen, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun. Mao stepped forward to a copse of microphones, shiny silver boxes balanced on the top of metal stands, sprouting hoops, springs and black wires. He held before him a sheet of paper with characters written in the old style, top to bottom. I was fascinated by his curtain of thick black hair, set far back on his skull as if fleeing the light of the intellect resting under the smooth expanse of his forehead.
Mao began to read from the paper, slurring the words in the broad Hunan provincial accent which made him unintelligible to most Chinese, in particular to the people of the Northeast with our perfectly standard pronunciation. There was a murmur of dismay in the crowd, and someone near me asked without irony if it was English that Mao was speaking. My father stood up, motioned to the projectionist to hold the film and produced from under his jacket a thick sheaf of papers. ‘A transcript of Chairman Mao’s address,’ he explained, and began to pass the papers around to the eager hands extended to him from all angles. There was a rustle of papers and a round of coughing, and then the projector stirred into life again and the film continued, except now instead of a sea of heads in front of me all I could see was the bobbing transcripts held above the audience’s heads so they could be read by the light of the projector. I recall nothing of the speech itself except for the last line, when Mao put down his paper and shouted, ‘China has arisen!’ The crowd at Tiananmen erupted with cheers – as did the audience packed into the room that night – and Mao retreated to the line of august faces.
*
After the Liberation I moved with my parents into a new house. It was in a traditional four-sided courtyard, and we found ourselves with the unimaginable luxury of four rooms – a kitchen, a living room, my parents’ bedroom with a kang, where we could all sleep in winter, and a tiny bedroom where I slept when the weather was not too cold. We shared a bathroom and washhouse across the central courtyard with the other occupants: the Deputy Mayor, his two children and his elderly parents. We were joint owners of a small rat-catching dog and a succession of pigs purchased as yearlings for the purpose of transforming our collected food scraps into sizzling New Year’s treats.
My father surveyed our small pile of possessions, which had been deposited on the kang, and toured our quarters several times before pronouncing himself satisfied. That night he slept soundly, so soundly in fact that we could not wake him in the morning. I shook his arm, at first gently and then more vigorously, but he snored softly and did not open his eyes. My mother checked his pulse and pulled back one eyelid and slapped his cheek several times, at which he muttered something I could not pick up and then slept on. ‘Exhaustion,’ my mother explained. He had not had any rest for a decade. But when I returned from school that night she told me he was in hospital.
So I found myself once again sleeping with my mother, having been ousted from her bed for only one night. She too was exhausted, and would often sleep through the weekends, rising only to accompany me on our daily visits to my father in hospital. During that time I would rise and dress myself and make breakfast, or take a small lidded pot to one of the stalls on the corner where a pair of elderly twins would fuss over me like beavers with a cub, and I would return with my pot brimming with hot soy milk and two dough sticks balanced on top.
After a month or so my father returned home, but for the first week he did no more than patter slowly around the house in between long sessions of corpse-like sleep. Day and night seemed to have no meaning for him, and he did not even seem interested in playing his records on the gramophone. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, and see him reading, or making tea with the medicinal herbs he kept in a glass jar. I would sit up on the old kang with my legs tucked beneath me and watch him measure out the contents of the jar into a shallow cone folded from a sheet of paper, and then tip them into another jar. The discoloured petals, crumbling leaf skeletons, and what looked like the transparent wings of insects collected like a bird’s nest on the bottom of the jar. He would pour in the newly boiled water, releasing a foul stink of musty alleys, fish, and camphor. I would pull the covers over my head and around dawn would hear him returning to bed, where he would lie perfectly still for ten or twelve hours.
Eventually he took it into his head to use his time to supplement my education in mathematics. We covered sheets of thin rice paper – mostly the reverse sides of official Nationalist-era forms – with sequences of algebraic formulae, meandering strings of calculus, angles, curves, grids and geometrical figures, and I would find myself bursting out laughing as I observed the sleight of hand by which he brought an equation to resolution, like the tumblers falling into place within the metal innards of a lock.
‘If you are patient,’ he assured me, ‘and attentive, then anything you encounter will open its secrets to you. If you scratch the surface of anything you will find that what lies beneath is a fine web of mathematics. Everything is number, and number is everything. Each atom has its own formula, each molecule, the metal of the table leg, the wood on its top, the stone on the floor.’
‘And people?’
‘Yes, people too, a formula for how they move in space and in relation to things and to each other, how they walk, the sounds they make, the way they take in food and drink – if we could see the minute web of things we would find an infinite number of formulae. Wait, no’ – and here he jumped to his feet as best he could and raised his index finger emphatically – ‘No, these formulae are not infinite. It is a finite number of formulae, and one day we will master them all, as they meet and merge and transform and resolve each other endlessly, day and night, throughout the world and throughout the universe. They are millions upon millions, but we too – the people of China – are millions upon millions.’
He went on to explain gravity to me, how the individual object is drawn inexorably towards a larger mass via a formula which he made me write out several times. And the universe too, at least, the universe as envisaged by Blaise Pascal: ‘An infinite sphere,’ he read from his book, ‘whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’
‘Like China,’ I said, ‘the ‘middle kingdom.’
He tilted his head for a moment, and then smiled happily and patted my head. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘but not many can see that. A socialist needs to be alert, for if we notice, upon traversing some territory or other – be it physical or intellectual, a territory of ideas, events, people, history – if we notice that lines that should be parallel are not quite so; if we observe and measure and connect, and do not allow ourselves simply to pass over these troubling facts as if they were aberrations with no significance; if instead we recognise that the aberrations are what is significant; then we will see that we are living, not on a flat, regular plane, but on the curved surface of a sphere. And if we have three settled points and measure them accurately, then we can locate the centre of the sphere, and however distant it may be, it is a fulcrum from which the world can be moved, hidden from the many, known only to the few.’ I tried to look as if I understood, and my father seemed happy to accept this obvious fiction, for he extended his hand for me to shake. What exactly we were agreeing to I did not know.
*
As my father’s strength returned he began to take me on his bicycle around the city, and to tell me stories from the early days of the Communist Party and the struggle against the Japanese. I could not help comparing his tours of the city, of the sites of street battles and safe houses and ambushes, with Piroshka’s accounts of the lives of the White Russians, the Jews, and the Fascists. Each showed me a city that the other had never inhabited and only partly understood, although we traversed the same streets and gave the same directions to lost visitors. On one occasion my father took me down an alley and through large gates into a hall with a high vaulted ceiling. My nostrils were immediately filled with a syrupy confection of blood and offal, as if we were walking into the maw of a sleeping tiger after a kill. Thick shafts of light descended from a row of skylights, illuminating benches upon which the carcasses of pigs, chickens, sheep, and ducks lay disassembled. Stall keepers stood at attention behind piles of intestines and stomachs, lungs and kidneys, tripes, gizzards, Achilles tendons and pizzles, watching us as if waiting for us to give the signal to begin a competition to put the carcasses back together again.
On one table four pigs’ heads, with eyes and tongues removed, were stacked neatly in a pyramid. On the next sat three large vats of congealed black liquid with dirty red froth around the rim, which handwritten signs identified as the blood of sheep, pigs and chickens respectively. My father whistled softly to himself as he pushed his bicycle through the braided rivulets of blood that traversed the floor. What struck me was how different this place was, with its displays of gleeful carnage, from the small kosher butcher shop, the one with the menorah painted in gold on the window, and the map of the quartered lamb on the back wall, where I used to go with Piroshka every week to collect small parcels of flesh wrapped respectfully in brown paper.
My father leant his bicycle against one stall and pointed to a pig’s head. The stall owner patted the head affectionately, as if it were his child. Money changed hands and the head was hoisted into the basket on the front of my father’s bicycle. It journeyed home with us like a ship’s figurehead, casting its eyeless gaze this way and that as we steered around corners, proudly sniffing the air, and calling to our neighbours with its tongueless mouth, ‘Look everyone, look at who has honoured me, has invited me to grace their family pot! None other than Iron Lu and his daughter, the violinist Xiao Magou!’
On weekends and summer evenings my father would spend time in the courtyard, attempting to practice tai ji chuan, or chatting with the neighbours. Sometimes I watched him as he stood for a long time in the middle of the courtyard, turning to a different point of the compass from time to time and staring at the angles of the roof, the paving stones and the pile of rubbish stacked against the back wall. I wondered if he was taking his own advice, looking for some lost mathematical principle, confident that if he was patient and stared for long enough it would eventually give itself up to him.
Then one day he showed my mother and me some plans he had drawn up for a fish pond he said he was going to build at the back of courtyard, where there was an old dried-up well. He would deepen the well, he said, and (provided he could restore the flow of water) build a large concrete trough about three metres long, in which he would keep river fish to be fattened up for the table. His plan included a small electric pump to draw the water from the trough and aerate it by cascading it down a miniature gorge of pebbles. There would be water lilies and orchids, and he would find some paint so that I could decorate the interior of the trough before it was filled.
‘And in the winter?’ my mother asked. ‘What happens in the winter when it freezes?’
‘We borrow a hammer and chisel,’ my father said. ‘And we eat frozen fish until there are no more. And then we start again in spring time, and put more young fish in the pond.’
*
The next day my father felt strong enough to return to work, and found that in his absence others had taken over the task of making the city hygienic and orderly, and were reluctant to give it back to him. He still had his office and his secretary, but his papers were stacked in neat piles in a locked cupboard and his desktop gleamed with new polish. It was Wen who told me this, years later, when I was about to leave Harbin. He also told me that for the following week my father travelled to every corner of the city to drink tea with Party officials of all ranks, that every day he had Wen place phone calls to Beijing and Shanghai, and that he even took a military aircraft fresh from the production line at the new aircraft factory and had a test pilot fly him to Jilin and Mukden in one day to visit old comrades, with Wen cowering beside him white with fear and suffering cold sweats and nausea.
At the end of that week my father told us that he had relinquished the position of Mayor and was to become Party Secretary at China Eastern Railways, and Commissar for Flood Control. He seemed very happy about this, although I recall going to school the next day fearful that, after his change of status, the special regard in which I was held as Iron Lu’s daughter might have diminished. My fears were groundless.
That very night he came home and, with the Deputy Mayor at his side, announced that I had been selected to play a concert for Mao Zedong in a week’s time. Mao was returning from a two-month sojourn in Moscow, my father explained. He was bringing back not only his first-hand observations of Soviet economic planning, but also a small red lacquer box containing the ashes of Xian Xinghai, China’s great revolutionary composer, who had died in Moscow in 1945.
The day arrived. The records show that Mao toured the railway workshops, delivered a speech (written text placed under the chairs in advance), attended a concert in his honour and spent a night at the suite on the top floor of the Hotel Moderne. I took top billing at the concert, accompanied by a small ensemble from the conservatory in Mukden. The heating in the theatre was working only intermittently, and the audience – party secretaries, local dignitaries, workers from the ball-bearing factory, and a company of soldiers from the barracks – sat for an hour waiting for the great man to arrive, hunched in their greatcoats with fur hats over their ears, steaming like a herd of bison.
I played a short piece adapted from the first movement of Xian Xinghai’s National Liberation Symphony, Massenet’s Élégie (which Xian himself had made famous after the defeat of the Guangzhou Commune), and Kreisler’s Prelude and Allegro (which my mother requested I play, as a surprise birthday present for my father). I was followed by a dance troupe, and a children’s choir who sang ‘The Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention’. And to finish, the Mukden ensemble and I played Nie Er’s March of the Volunteers – newly confirmed as the national anthem – after which the choir joined in and sang the words: ‘Arise! All those who would not be slaves! Let your flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall!’ Mao tapped one hand lightly on his opposite palm by way of applause, and afterwards made a speech about there being many strings in the bow of the Party, these strings being the individual Party members and the Communist Youth League, which must be stretched together in tight formation, or else there would be no sound. The shaft of the bow was Marxist-Leninist thought; the body of the violin was the Middle Kingdom itself. (My father was very pleased with this metaphor, claiming that he himself had suggested it to the Great Leader.)
In spring the floods came as usual, and my father summoned the Party leaders to the floodplain outside the city and, stripping himself to the waist, swam out to a large tree marooned in the still waters, where he hoisted himself onto a branch and sat, torso glistening in the sun, to announce that that year’s flood would be the last. The news spread quickly around the city that tens of thousands of peasants from the western provinces – where one of father’s Yan’an colleagues was Party Secretary – would arrive in summer to work on new floodbanks, and that my father had explained all this as he swung joyfully on a rope attached to the tree, urging the senior Party officials to shed their clothes and join him in celebrating the event. Wen showed me the photographs that had been taken at the scene: my father addressing the crowd from the tree; my father swinging gaily to and fro as some of his comrades – including our housemate the Deputy Mayor – struggled with their clothes and threw themselves into the flood waters; those that had remained ashore applauding, with fixed grins; my father, back on dry land, wearing a bath robe with the monogram of the Hotel Moderne, laughing, with his head thrown back and his hands on his hips and the scar on his eyebrow somehow larger than I had ever noticed. Within a year, Wen told me, all of those who had remained on the embankment had been quietly demoted to clerical positions in dusty border towns. Two had died by their own hands. The Deputy Mayor was promoted to Mayor, despite which, Wen told me, he still made a daily visit to my father’s office to receive orders.
For the time being all thought of deepening the well and building a fish pond was set aside. After school each day I made my way up to the corner of Razyezhaya Street and climbed the familiar staircase of the dark brick apartment building for my violin lesson. By this time the building that had housed the Club of the Russian Student Society was the headquarters of the neighbourhood committee, and advertised night classes in Marxist political theory, perinatal health, the piano accordion, and Mao Zedong thought.
One afternoon in early summer I arrived at the apartment and found that Kasimir and Piroshka were not there. In their place were a young Chinese woman and an older man, a Russian who, in spite of the fact that it was a moderately warm day, kept his hands thrust into the pockets of a long overcoat with a belt and buckle dangling from its sides and a detachable cape.
‘Are you Xiao Magou?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Your violin teacher has sent us to collect you,’ she said. ‘You are to have your lesson today in the centre of the city. It is all arranged.’
I followed the two strangers downstairs and they drove me in a car to Central Avenue, where we drew up outside the Hotel Moderne. ‘Here we are,’ the woman said. ‘Mr Karpin will accompany you to your lesson.’ She withdrew, and the Russian man took my violin case and strode ahead of me through the main door of the hotel, barely acknowledging the salute of the soldier who stood guard.
We passed the hotel reception desk and walked briskly across the chess-board floor of a high-ceilinged lounge, threading our way amongst padded leather chairs, drooping palms and stands of bamboo in large porcelain tubs. The lounge appeared empty save for a trio of army officers holding conclave in one corner around a hissing radiator. A pair of long boots stretched out from behind a rubber plant, heels resting upon a grey footstool that on second glance turned out to be an elephant’s foot.
We stepped into the elevator, and I noticed Mr Karpin’s surprise when he turned from the panel of buttons to find that I was almost as tall as him. (I was prematurely sprouting in the legs and arms.) ‘You speak a little Russian?’ he said. I corrected him, ‘I speak a lot of Russian,’ and smiled to myself. He said no more. When the elevator stopped with a bump he wrenched aside the squealing brass gate and pushed open the door with his foot. We walked through the gloom of the corridor, the dim lights illuminating patches of vermilion wallpaper decorated with a gold scroll pattern. At the end of the corridor Mr Karpin opened a door without knocking and led me into a large room.
‘Wait here,’ he whispered, and handed my violin case back to me. Then he left the room, taking great care to close the door soundlessly.
I put my violin on a low table by the door and turned to examine my new surroundings. As if on cue, a silver clock to my right, set in its own cabinet with tiny drawers, announced my arrival with a tinkling fanfare. And as if in response, the crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling rattled discreetly, and with its myriad facets directed beams of milky white light onto the other occupants of the room: a sprawling divan with round tasselled cushions, a marble chess set on a circular table, and a polished bureau, on which sat a silver samovar in the shape of a turnip and a matching silver tray whose lip encircled a plate of cakes, an array of scimitar-shaped knives, a tea-cutter, a sugar-hammer, and a nest of gold-rimmed tea-glasses. Standing beside the tray on its own lace doily was a bottle of vodka.
I had had very little experience of beautiful objects. With very few exceptions – the mirror, the clocks, a couple of plates – the things in the apartment in the Bolshoi Prospekt and now in our new house in Daoli were servants dressed in plain brown or black, who did their job silently and then retreated into anonymity. Here in this room everything sought out the eye in its own right. Nothing here was plain. Every surface was carpeted or papered or moulded in relief with geometrical patterns that folded in on themselves and led my eyes along intricate mazes. I wandered around the room studying surfaces that were turned or carved with designs of vines or flowers, or inlaid with some luminous metal, or polished so smooth as to give the illusion of glowing coals encased in a sheet of thin ice.
And then I felt the polarity in the room change and found myself drawn to a table in front of the window, tucked behind a high-backed armchair. On it was a violin case wrapped in navy blue cloth. Without hesitation I opened it.
I do not know how much I took in during those first few minutes. Later on, when it came into my possession, I came to know the violin intimately, as one knows the body of a lover or a child. In my memory, however, I pull back the loose satin cover and lift the instrument into the windowlight. I study the neck, the backward-sloping peg-box, the scroll shaped like the inside of a child’s ear, all carved from a single piece of maple. I hold the instrument up close to my eye like a telescope, registering the dull shine of the ebony fingerboard, oiled with finger-sweat, and allow my focus to travel slowly forwards along the parallel lines of the strings down to the bridge, a thin sliver of Balkan maple from which have been cut two ears flanking the inverted heart in the centre. I spin the instrument sideways and run my eyes along the elegant inlaid purfling around the rim and then across the contours of the upper body, the table, two symmetrical wedges of spruce whose feminine curves and sinuous f-shaped sound holes give the instrument the appearance of a pair of butterfly wings, varnished with walnut oil to give a rich red glow. My gaze rests finally on the black ebony tailpiece where the ends of the strings concentrate, like nerves at the base of the spine, and the loop of gut which gathers all the tension of the instrument and deposits it onto a simple hardwood peg attached to the base.
A voice behind me said softly, in Russian, ‘Perhaps you will play it one day.’ I turned and saw a tall man, who had entered silently by one of the doors in the suite. He had black hair and a receding hairline, and his mouth and jowls jutted forward so that they seemed of a piece with the well-padded armchairs by the window. His forehead resembled a large boulder that had slipped from its original position, compressing his features into the lower half of his face. Even so he was not unpleasant looking. He was wearing a finely-checked jacket, a black shirt without a tie, and dark trousers.
He motioned for me to sit on one of the chairs and sat opposite me. ‘You understand Russian?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘My name is David,’ he said, ‘and I am from Odessa in the Ukraine. I am travelling with another musician from Russia, Comrade Richter, for some performances in Beijing and Shanghai, but since our train passes through Harbin I had the opportunity to meet with Kasimir and Piroshka and to deliver a parcel – to deliver this violin.’
‘The violin is theirs?’ I asked.
‘It belongs to their son, Vitja. You have heard of Vitja, no? I myself have not met him.’ David leaned forward in his chair. ‘Now, please listen,’ he said, inclining his head towards me. ‘Vitja is now a very sick man – still passably well in his body, but very sick in his mind. It was my duty to inform his parents, and they are very distressed, as you would expect. It is so difficult to have . . . to have circumstances which keep you from doing what a parent would want to do for a son.’ The man was silent for a while, as if inviting me to speak. I could think of nothing to say. I felt the edge of his warm breath on my face. It was laced with unfamiliar spices. As he shifted in his chair his clothing creaked.
‘Where are they?’ I asked. ‘Piroshka? And Kasimir?’
‘They are in Comrade Richter’s suite. I asked what I could do for them, and they said I could give you your lesson for today. So you are here. Kasimir believes that soon he will have nothing more to teach you.’ The man’s face suddenly became animated and he slapped both knees with his hands and rose from his chair. ‘Shall we begin, then? What piece have you learned for today?’
‘ Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances,’ I said, ‘but we don’t have a piano to accompany me.’
‘You ask a lot of Comrade David and the Hotel Moderne,’ he said. ‘Play. I will supply piano accompaniment inside my head.’
I took out my violin, which seemed like a toy compared to the one lying in the case by the window, and arranged my music on the stand. I closed my eyes and, envisaging Piroshka addressing the piano, counted myself in and began to play. When I had finished Comrade David clapped three times, and said, ‘Brava! Very good. You have a beautiful, natural, unforced tone. Brava!’ He cleared his throat, and went on. ‘Now let us get to work. First, your vibrato. Very good, very lyrical, but you must use it sparingly or your audience will become distracted by your skill and they will miss the point of the music. Do you understand?’
I nodded, and Comrade David continued, ‘And you must not overdo the sighing and the glissandi. Yes, I know the violin is the natural instrument for melancholy; but it is also the natural instrument for intellectual joy. Understand?’ I nodded again. ‘Pathos, yes,’ he went on, turning on his heel and circling around an armchair, ‘but also greatness, power.’ He clenched his fist and jerked it twice in front of his face.
I nodded a third time.
‘Now this piece by the beloved Bohemian – it is too playful for you, too romantic. You are a tall girl, and angular. You must try something more suited to your physique and temperament.’
He turned and left the room, returning a minute later with a score under one arm and a violin and bow in the other hand. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you must play some Bach. Do you know Bach? I know Kasimir likes his Romantics, but you must come to terms with Bach. He is inevitable. If he did not already exist, we would have to invent him. Ha!’ He arranged the score on the music stand and started flicking through its pages. ‘This piece is for two violins. I played it in Moscow with Menuhin in 1945, just after the war. Yehudi Menuhin, you know. It was a symbol of unity with the West, I believe. He is a fine, fine violinist, and, of course, a Jew like me. A Jew from the East and a Jew from the West. How rich a symbol is that? Now, I want you to play one of the parts of the slow movement. It is a simple melody so if you do not know it you can sight-read. Do you want me to play it through first?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I will try it by myself.’
‘Then I will count you in,’ he said. ‘Play the top line.’
I began, haltingly in the first couple of bars, until I found the rhythm, and then more fluently. Comrade David tucked his violin under his arm and turned away from me to look out the window to the street below, calling out from time to time – but without turning his head – ‘slower’ and ‘more round’ and ‘less vibrato’ and ‘now, build, build, build, and . . . release.’
When I had finished he turned to me and said, ‘You see what I mean? Emotion. And intellect. I see the violin as a horse, all power, all emotion, with wild eyes and sweat coating its limbs and its great heart pounding in its great chest; but you, a mere child, with no more than your intellect, with the fine muscles of your mind, with the strings of your bow, you . . . are guiding it up and down narrow ridges, through dark valleys and forests, and . . . Oh, I speak in riddles. Do you understand what I am trying to say?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, yes; I think so.’
‘You think so? Is that any way for a young socialist to talk? We deal with facts, with certainties, even if they are expressed by riddling old men. That is what Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao teach us, is it not?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, wondering for a moment if I had thereby called Stalin and Mao riddling old men.
‘And every note on this page is a fact, is it not?’ he tapped the score with the end of his bow, ‘a single autonomous fact which, with all the other notes, adds up to the larger fact of the piece?’
‘Yes.’
‘I rest my case. Now, shall we play both parts together?’ Without waiting for me to reply, he placed his violin under his chin and plucked each string to check that it was in tune. ‘You take the first part again,’ he said, ‘and I will follow with the second.’
I began to play, and after the first two bars he joined in, his playing curling itself around my own like a snake. After a while I was aware only of the sound of his violin beside me: an even sound, rounded off, flowing and melodic, deep in the bass and crystalline in the higher tones. I felt that I was not playing at all, or rather that my playing was enveloped in his. Then as the music rose to its highest peak and began its long, winding descent I began to hear my own playing again, distinct from his, the vibrato proffered and then withdrawn, the notes simple: facts without any adornment.
We finished and the music echoed around the room for longer than I would have thought possible, as if the silver clock, the divan with its scrolled arm, the pieces of the chess set, and the distant landscapes in their frames had absorbed the sound and were humming it to themselves. I knew in that moment that what my father had said was right; that a moment of happiness can be so great that in comparison all earlier happiness could seem merely another form of sadness.
Before either of us could speak there was the sound of polite clapping. I turned and saw that Mr Karpin had entered the room. ‘Comrade David Fiodorovich, we must go soon,’ he said. ‘The train leaves in less than an hour. I must return Miss Xiao to the apartment and you must finish packing your bags.’
‘Very well,’ Comrade David said, and turning to me he offered me his hand. ‘It has been a pleasure, but of course I wish the circumstances were better. Perhaps we will meet again, since, like me, you have been marked out as a socialist artist. Kasimir has begged me to find you a place in a Conservatory somewhere – with Carl Flesch in London, he suggested, or with Ginette Neveu in Paris, and I did not have the heart to tell him that both are now dead. Nevertheless I will try my best. I hope we will meet again. Now you must go.’
I quickly returned my violin to its case, and stole another glance around the room as I walked to the door that Mr Karpin held open for me. As I turned to thank Comrade David, I found he was closing up the violin case by the window and turning the key in its small lock. ‘You must take this with you,’ he said, holding out the case and the key to Mr Karpin, but addressing himself to me. ‘I will tell Kasimir and Piroshka that I have entrusted the violin to their pupil.’ He shook my hand again, and moments later I was standing with Mr Karpin in the hallway.
*
Back at the empty apartment I put the violin case on the table, turned the key in the lock and gently picked up the instrument and placed it under my chin. The E-string was slightly flat, so I sat down at the piano and tuned each of the violin’s strings in turn. I was about to pick up the bow and start to play when I felt a weight on my hand, as if another hand were resting on top of mine, and a question formed in my mind: ‘But what would you play?’ The question paralysed me. As I was about to place the violin back in its case I noticed that the velvet lining bulged in several places, as if the padding beneath it were uneven. When I pressed down on the bulges with my finger, I heard the crackle of thin sheets of paper beneath. I examined the edges of the lining to see if it could be peeled back. Down one side I found that it was held in place only by a few stitches. I took a knife and gingerly cut these stitches, and pulled out from beneath the lining several small envelopes stuffed with papers. I removed the papers and spread them out on the table, having first returned the violin to its case and snapped it shut.
They were letters, written in a neat hand in Cyrillic script, the ink a blue-black colour, the paper thin and crinkled. Except for one letter. This one was typed on the back of three sheets of manuscript paper which were half filled with handwritten notation – a series of arpeggios in the key of D-minor, and a long passage in 6/8 time – with wavy lines drawn contemptuously through them. The letter was dated October 1946. I began to read.
My beloved Papa and Mama,
It is my intention that this letter be sent to you only in the event that some tragedy, common or extraordinary, has overtaken me. I hope you will have some comfort at least in receiving news that my life, for the most part, has been happy and fulfilled.
I have enclosed with this letter all the letters I have written to you but did not send for fear of placing you in danger. Some of them are letters that I have kept in my head, memorising them, and have only recently written out. The poets here have adopted this practice. For periods during the last twenty years it has been too dangerous to commit one’s serious work to paper, or to publish anything except hymns to the local gods. So we have learned to compose in our heads, and we carry around volumes of poetry up there, small libraries, each with its wizened librarian and its roaming silverfish and dark, forgotten corners, all of it encased in bone, so that if we are searched there is no possibility of being found in possession of erroneous sonnets.
In this way Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ was carried out of the country in the head of one of her friends. I wonder if you have heard it recited. It concerns a mother waiting in line at a prison gate, hoping for a glimpse of her son.
After my return from Irkutsk I completed my studies and have made a passable career for myself teaching at a small institute in Kronstadt, writing scholarly articles on Pushkin, and lyric poetry about the happiness to be had in the cycle of the seasons. More latterly I have been writing songs and libretti for composers. These are all based on folk stories, because as we all know Russian folk traditions speak of the lives of solid, loam-footed people, and of the happiness to be had in the cycle of the seasons.
I have many other poems in my head, poems like Akhmatova’s. I wish someone would carry mine to America too, and publish them there. (I realise that I do not even know if you have reached America. Perhaps you are in Shanghai – but then with the war, the Japanese occupation, the ghetto, surely not . . .)
Now to explain the violin. You should recognise it, Papa, since it is the one the young princess played when you taught her in the Aleksandr Palace at Tsarkoe Selo. It came into my possession in 1920, not long after I returned to St Petersburg (or Leningrad, as they have now renamed our city). I opened my door one night to a man who introduced himself as a former footman at the palace. He had the violin with him, wrapped in a sack. He said the Grand Duke himself had entrusted it to him in 1914, with instructions to wait until the turmoil had settled and then to deliver it into your hands, Papa, as a token of their appreciation for your tutelage of the princess. The man had stowed the violin in an attic for several years, and then began to make enquiries after your whereabouts. It took him several more years to find his way to my door. I explained that you were probably in America and promised to find a way to get the violin to you. I fed the man the dinner I had prepared for myself, and have not seen him since.
You may recall that the Tsarina believed the violin was made in the late 18th century by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesú of Cremona, which would make it one of the most valuable in all of Russia. It is certainly a fine instrument, but I am afraid she was mistaken. I showed it recently to a violinist friend of Dmitri Dmitrievich – about whom more soon – who identified it as one of the imitation Guarneri instruments made by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume around 1860. She told me that Vuillaume’s imitations were astoundingly accurate, right down to the worn varnish and patination, and that only a tone-deaf capitalist would care that it was not a genuine Guarneri. Fritz Kreisler owns a Vuillaume, she told me, which he has given on loan to the Pole, Josef Hassid.
I have now entrusted the violin, and my letters, to Dmitri Dmitrievich, or Mitya, as he insists I call him. He has been unreasonably generous to me, as was his uncle, Boleslav, in putting us up in Irkutsk (but I hear Boleslav is now dead, have you heard this news?). Mitya has recommended my work to several operatic composers. He himself will not write any more operas for fear that they will attract the same condemnation as his last one, which was officially described as ‘chaos instead of music’ even after it had received acclaim from the most orthodox of critics and had been performed more than a hundred times to full houses.
I have already related this story in one of my letters. And I have also told the story of our life in Leningrad during the 1941 siege. You will see that it is true that music carried the citizens of Leningrad through the inferno. One remembers Oistrakh playing at the Bolshoi Theatre with a hole in the roof and a shell crater by the orchestra pit; and Klavdia Shulzhenko and her jazz band performing ‘Blue Headscarf’ and ‘Companions in Arms’ on the front lines; but most of all one remembers Mitya’s Seventh Symphony, performed one sweltering August night by members of the Radio Orchestra supplemented by soldiers on loan from army units defending the city. O, the lyricism of that symphony! elevating our patriotism into – dare I say it – the Divine light of humanism. Who would not embrace even death for that cause? Afterwards it was said on the streets in all seriousness: ‘Shostakovich is more powerful than Hitler. Berlin may have Beethoven’s Ninth, but Leningrad has Shostakovich and his Seventh.’
But you can read this for yourselves. The war is over, but what victory have we secured? Our dignity, our composure, our pride are under threat again, and so too our lives. My situation is very fragile. To be a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is very difficult (even after the terrible, unbelievable events in Germany and Poland), and to be one who writes is even more difficult. I often dream that a large iron key has been inserted into my mouth and turned so that it scrapes against my gums and crushes my teeth and bloodies my tongue, making all speech impossible. Mitya is more secure. His fame affords him protection (though not as much as one might think) and he has the opportunity to travel out of the country, which few others have. What is more, it is not so suspicious that he should have such a fine violin in his possession.
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.