In May of 1957, the Shanghai Liberation Daily – like every other newspaper in China – published Mao Zedong’s essay ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’. When I arrived at the Conservatory that morning it was pinned to the front door for all to read. Diversity of thought was a constructive thing, Mao wrote, and now that China had successfully emerged as a socialist nation in the years since the Civil War such diversity could be encouraged. The essay contained the sentence that was to be on everyone’s lips for the next two months, and then locked away inside the deepest cavern of our thoughts for the next decade:
Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.
At the time I was taken up with watching two particular flowers bloom. First, I had been invited to join the second violins in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for their upcoming all-Chinese performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The practice rooms were down by the river, in a large warehouse upstairs from a fish market. Rehearsals began in late May, and coincided with the arrival of the huang-mei, a month of rain named after the yellow plum that ripens at that time of year. The rain itself, which came daily in gushing downpours, brought a temporary respite from the humidity and the heat. During that month, green mould formed on stored clothes, and we made jokes about our bed sheets yielding a crop of fresh mushrooms every morning. At night in the orchestra practice rooms, the smell of the day’s commerce of fish gained in strength, until rehearsals were like a two-hour bath in a bowl of stale fish soup. I got Ling Ling to leave me a bucket of warm water in the hallway, so that I could wash the smell off my skin when I returned home.
The other flower bloomed in mid-June. Pavel Gachev had returned to Russia for the summer, and Raya Vishinsky was to stay on for a couple of weeks to finish some research before joining him. The night after Pavel left Kirill visited again, bringing a bottle of vodka and talking quietly with Raya for an hour before leaving in his car. It was the first occasion he had visited in Pavel’s absence. This time they kept the door closed in spite of the humidity, and so I stood in the dark with my ear pressed to the keyhole, picking up the occasional phrase but nothing more.
The following night Kirill arrived again, this time carrying a large bag in his arms. Raya closed the door again, but after a couple of minutes opened it and waved a cloud of cigarette smoke into the corridor. I shrank into a corner as she stood in the doorway for a moment and took a long pull on her cigarette, turning it in her fingers and studying it while she breathed out through her nose and mouth simultaneously. She returned to her guest, but left the door ajar. I positioned myself by the door, amidst the slowly sinking drifts of hazy blue. Kirill was explaining that he had to go away the following week on consulate business. ‘To Beijing?’ Raya asked.
‘No,’ Kirill replied. ‘To Moscow first. Marshall Peng De Huai the Defence Minister will be there for talks with Khrushchev. So I must be there also. And then afterwards I go to Paris and London and Washington.’
‘Washington? Why Washington?’
‘Some senior members of the Central Committee wish to go on a journey. It is my job to check out the accommodation and to ensure they receive a warm welcome.’
‘So you are a travel agent, Kirill? Another string to your bow.’
‘This is very special travel. Many, many people must independently cover great distances, and arrive simultaneously at new destinations.’
‘Perhaps I should not have asked the question, and perhaps I would not understand the answer even if you told me.’
There was the clink of bottle on glass.
At that moment I heard the rustle of feet on the stairs above me, and the sound of several voices, including Comrade Meretrenko’s. I sprang to my feet. With the light from the open door there was nowhere for me to hide. I took a few steps forward, heading down to the next floor, but then heard more voices and footsteps approaching from below. I was caught, and in my panic I slipped through the open door into the vestibule of Raya’s apartment, hoping to hide there until the ascending and descending parties had crossed. Beyond the thin curtain, Raya and her guest continued to talk; but when they heard the commotion as Comrade Meretrenko greeted his neighbours in the corridor, Raya said, ‘I should close that door now,’ and came towards me. I quickly stepped in the coat cupboard, whose entrance was covered by another thin curtain, and found myself awkwardly positioned amidst padded winter jackets, women’s knee-length boots, a broom and a floor mop. Raya closed the apartment door, and the chain-lock rattled into place.
For several minutes I stood perfectly still, waiting for the thumping in my chest to subside and for my breathing to return to normal. Raya and her guest were talking quietly about Raya’s plans to visit her mother in Leningrad the following month. Then they were silent for a long time, so long in fact that I began to wonder if they had fallen into a drunken sleep. Then I heard the man’s voice again. ‘I have brought you a new record. Viktor brought it back from Paris for me.’
‘A corrupting French composer?’ Raya asked.
‘What else?’ Kirill said. ‘It is Maurice Ravel. Let me play you my favourite piece. It is a kind of gypsy tune called Tzigane. Perhaps you know it.’
After a moment the music began: a dramatic solo piece on the violin, full of double-stopping, a difficult technique in which two notes are played simultaneously on separate strings. The music brought to my mind a Uighur dance I had once seen in Harbin, when a caravan of traders came to the edge of the city to sell pelts and knives and roots of ginseng (which, my mother pointed out to me, bore a striking resemblance to boiled children). The dancers – two men, one young, the other old – were tied together at the wrists, as if engaged in a ritual fight to the death, and flung each other around a circular earthen pit. Here too, in this music, there were bursts of energy followed by vertiginous pauses on single notes; and then the melody and the harmony, and with them my imaginary dancers, would swoop once again, twisting and turning around their locked wrists, centrifuge and pivot, planet and moon, matching limb to limb, muscle to muscle, flank to flank, face to face. It was like nothing I had heard before.
The piece lasted a good ten minutes, and when it finished there was silence once more, except for the repeated clicking of the stylus as the record spun beneath it. I waited for someone to raise the arm of the record player and for the clicking to end, but it did not. After several minutes I stole a glance from my hiding place into the vestibule, and then, hearing nothing at all from Raya and her guest, I tiptoed across the floor and put my face to the curtain, trying to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. I could see only a sliver of the scene between the two halves of the curtain. I saw a portion of Kirill’s bare shoulder, peppered with black hairs, and the back of his head; and lodged in the crook of his neck I saw the sole of Raya’s foot, still clothed in a dark stocking, but with a large hole at the heel. Behind her heel I saw Raya’s face. She was supporting herself on her elbows, her lips oddly pursed, her eyes flicking up and down, her brows flinching as if she were receiving treatment from some rough doctor. She tried without success to blow away a strand of hair that had fallen across her face, and then smiled and mouthed ‘spasiba’ as Kirill’s hand brushed it back. Then she brought her arms forward and hoisted herself towards Kirill and her face appeared by his elbow, her eyes clenched tightly shut for a moment before they opened in a wide blank stare. I turned aside quickly for fear she would see me, and all I heard from then on was the sound of their breathing, gasps of laughter or surprise or disappointment, audible beneath the gentle clicking from the record player.
I retreated to the coat cupboard. My heart was beating fast and my temples hurt. The music was playing again in my head, and although I tried to I could not halt its progress. And this time I saw in my mind’s eye, not the beautiful dance I had imagined previously, but the clasping of bodies, the clammy smell of warm breath, and the release of folds of flesh from sweat-moistened clothing.
After a while the apartment fell silent. I contemplated letting myself out, but realised that it would involve releasing the chain-lock. Even if the noise did not disturb the lovers within, the unattached chain might alert Raya to the fact that someone else had been in the apartment with them. I decided I would have to take my chances in the morning, and tried to make myself comfortable and to formulate what I would say in the event that I was discovered. An hour passed, and I was drifting in and out of sleep when I heard a noise next to me. Someone was standing outside the door of the apartment, and whoever it was began to knock on the door, gently at first and then more loudly. It must have been the driver from the consulate, impatient to retrieve his charge and return home to his bed. Within minutes I heard Kirill unhook the chain and let himself out, leaving the chain swinging free. I seized the moment and slipped from my hiding place into the vestibule and then out into the stairwell.
Back in my room I found my own bed, and as I lay waiting for sleep I heard the distant bells of the old Custom House, playing ‘The East is Red’ followed by two long tones.
*
Madame Huang carefully noted down the events of the previous night. I explained how I had ended up inside the apartment, and what Raya and her friend Kirill had said. ‘Her foot was where?’ Madame Huang asked, and as she wrote she tried several times to banish the smile that crept like a kitten across her face. She was most pleased with the revelation that Kirill was going to London and Washington. ‘Now this is very important, and we need to know more. But it poses a problem for us,’ she said. ‘We cannot rely upon the door being left open.’ Madame Huang pondered the question for a while, tapping her chin with end of a pencil. ‘When did Comrade Vishinsky say she was leaving for the Soviet Union?’ she asked. I told her I thought it was within the next couple of weeks. ‘Good,’ she said, and dismissed me.
In the weeks that followed, the Hundred Flowers Movement gathered momentum. There were protests against the Party and its elitism. ‘Party members enjoy many privileges which make them a race apart,’ complained one opinion piece in the Shanghai Liberation Daily. There were reports of the establishment of a Democracy Wall at Beijing University, covered with posters critical of the Party. Art and culture was suddenly in vogue. The papers published poetry by poets whose voices had not been heard for years. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra was given new quarters, and we found ourselves rehearsing in the reception hall of a former embassy on Bubbling Well Road in the old International Settlement.
Meanwhile Director Ho published an article praising the prize-winning pianist Fu Cong, and the inspiration he had received from his father, Fu Lei, the translator of bourgeois French novels, who had received no mention in the initial enthusiasm over Fu Cong’s success. Ho expressed regret that China had not passed through a capitalist phase, since he believed that would have inspired a more adventurous musical culture and produced many more performers like Fu Cong, not to mention works by Chinese composers that could have ranked alongside Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He urged Chinese parents to encourage any signs of musical talent in their children, and to hold out to them the prospect of competing in international competitions, and winning accolades for their country.
Things also improved in the Foreign Teachers’ Building. It was announced that the plumbing system would be completely modernised, and that work on the project would begin immediately. Although they had not complained about the plumbing system in the building, the Russian advisors were happy to go along with the idea. Asked why the haste, it was made clear that funds had been freed up from elsewhere and workmen were available. Besides, several of the Russian advisors were returning to visit their families during the summer, so June and July would be the least disruptive time to do the work. Raya Vishinsky brought forward her travel plans, packed her suitcase and was gone within days.
*
In September 1957 I received another letter from my mother. The Hundred Flowers were blooming in Harbin too, she wrote, and in the food stalls by the riverbank people met to talk late into the night about their hopes and their frustrations. Everywhere there is argument, she wrote. In the streets, the markets, in factories, in the alleyways, in the hospital. It is as if life is our adversary, and every step forward must be won by belligerence and contention. Kasimir and Piroshka had returned to Moscow, she added, matter-of-factly, to look after their son. And my father’s health was not good, she went on. He had stopped riding his bicycle after several bad falls, one of which had led to a broken finger. But he continued to go to work most days, she assured me, and, she added, I should not even think of returning home. She and my father had discussed the possibility and agreed I should wait until the end of my studies.
I sat on my bed reading the letter over and over until I knew every stroke of every character that had flowed from my mother’s pen, and as I read they released into my mind a flood of tiny, half-formed thoughts, like unresolved chords. That was where Ling Ling found me some time afterwards, sitting motionless with the letter in my lap. ‘Where were you?’ she said. ‘We had a booking for a practice room, but you never turned up, so we lost it. Tian is mad with you.’ When I didn’t respond she sat down beside me on the bed quietly, and, placing her chin on my shoulder, began to read the letter. ‘Bad news?’ she asked.
‘My father is sick,’ I said. ‘My mother is protecting me from the truth. She won’t tell me how sick he is.’
‘Then you must go to him,’ she said, ‘despite what your mother says.’ And she sprang to her feet, and then crouched down beside me and pulled her suitcase from beneath the bed. She opened it, thrust her hand amongst her clothes and produced a small cloth pouch. From this she took a roll of bank notes and peeled off several. ‘Here,’ she said, folding the notes and pressing them into my palm. ‘You’ll need this to pay for your ticket. We can go the station right away and buy it.’
I looked up at her without speaking, and in response she closed my fingers over the money and squeezed my hand shut. ‘But of course you’ll need permission from the Director,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to his office first.’ And with that she pulled me to my feet, threaded her arm through mine, and guided me downstairs to the street and around the corner to the Conservatory.
We sat in Director Ho’s office waiting for him to appear, while his secretary roamed about rustling papers and sighing at us. After an hour Director Ho bustled in, trailing a line a smoke from the freshly-lit cigarette in his hand. He made for his desk, and then stopped short when he saw us perched on the edge of his low sofa. The secretary appeared at his side. ‘I’ll tell them to come back later,’ he said to Director Ho.
‘No, no, no,’ Director Ho said. ‘We all have work to do. Better to deal with things when we can.’ He sat down opposite us and drew on his cigarette, sucking as much out of it as he could before stamping it into an ashtray on the table between us. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘tell me your business.’
I found my voice and began to explain the letter from my mother, the news of my father’s illness, the reasons why I should ignore their plea that I remain in Shanghai. Ho listened intently, muttering short affirmations at the end of each of my statements and from time to time rubbing his cheeks and eyebrows with his fingers, as if trying to wipe something from his skin.
‘Show me the letter,’ he said. I gave it to him and watched the top of his head as he smoothed out the pages on his knee and read it. ‘You are right,’ he said as he folded the letter and returned it to me. ‘You must go to see your father. His condition appears serious.’ He leaned back in his chair, and turned his face towards the window and the trees in the courtyard shedding their blossom. Ling Ling squeezed my hand tight. Without turning back to me, Director Ho went on, ‘But first there is something you must do – a small detour, you might say.’
He paused. ‘A detour?’ I said.
He turned back to face me. ‘I want you to pack your things and be ready to leave immediately. It may be tonight or tomorrow morning,’ he said.
‘Leave for Harbin?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘For Moscow or Bucharest. As of yet I can’t tell you which one. In both cities there is an international competition. Our friend Comrade Meretrenko tells me your playing is of a very high standard, and that you are ready for such things.’
I began to protest my unworthiness, but Director Ho rose to his feet and summoned his secretary. ‘I have no time for shows of false modesty,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘You would not be at this Conservatory if you did not have talent. Now leave me. I have to find seats on an aeroplane going west.’ He ushered us from his office and shut the door behind us.
Before dawn the next morning I was woken by Madame Huang and bundled into a military car purring quietly at the entrance to our building. She handed me a small booklet. It was a passport, with a photograph of me that had been taken when I first arrived at the Conservatory at the age of thirteen. ‘You are flying to Bucharest this morning with Director Ho and Tian Mei Yun,’ she told me. ‘There is an international competition. We have instructions to send our best performers. There was a military plane available, and we could not pass up the opportunity.’
She sat beside me as we drove through the quiet streets towards the outskirts of the city. ‘There is something else you should know,’ she said after a while. ‘Our great pianist, Fu Cong, has defected to the West.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘It is said he has fallen in love with the daughter of Yehudi Menuhin,’ she replied. ‘No doubt he has also fallen in love with the life of ease his father enjoyed, and fallen out of love with China and its people.’
‘And Director Ho . . .’
‘Director Ho sees one of the stars on our country’s flag trembling, and wants Tian and you to reach out your hands to steady it.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Which one of the stars? The one that represents the bourgeois?’
She turned away from me and looked out of the opposite window and was quiet for so long that I thought she would not reply to my question. ‘I am a simple person,’ she said eventually. ‘I know a lot about the struggle of our people, but I know very little about music. So my advice to you is the same advice I gave to my brother’s son when he left for the war in Korea.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Do not fail.’
I wanted to ask if her brother’s son had failed; but by the way she turned her face from me once more and put her hand to the window I knew immediately what her answer would be. We rode on in silence, and after half an hour arrived at an airfield behind a row of low-slung barracks. Our car passed two check-points, and was then ushered onto the tarmac where a squat silver-grey aeroplane was being refuelled. Director Ho and Tian Mei Yun were waiting for me at the foot of the steps. ‘Hurry up,’ Director Ho said. ‘The pilot wants to leave as soon as possible.’ He took my suitcase from me and carried it up the steps on his head, like a coolie. Inside we were ordered to strap ourselves into the hard seats for take off. Apart from the three of us, the plane was filled with soldiers, young officers going to Bucharest for training, we were told. They seemed to have orders to speak to no one. Director Ho leaned over to me. ‘I have discussed this with Comrade Meretrenko,’ he said. ‘He has recommended the pieces you are to play. The scores are in my satchel.’
It was my first flight, and had I not been wedged beside a large soldier who smoked incessantly and then fell into a fitful snoring sleep, I might have enjoyed it. After three or four hours we were all jolted into alertness as the plane lurched forward into a steep dive. The engines began to whine and the fuselage rattled and juddered. The soldier next to me woke up, blinking rapidly, and seized the armrest tightly. A hot water flask tumbled down the aisle and came to rest against the door to the cockpit. Pressure began to build up in my ears, dulling the strained sound of the engines. I looked behind me and saw Director Ho and Tian, eyes tight shut, backs pushed into their seats, cheeks taut and drained of colour.
After several minutes, the plane came out of its dive, and moments later dropped its undercarriage and drifted in to land. I heard Tian vomit into a bag in the seat behind me, and I realised that I had grabbed hold of the hand of the soldier next to me and had sunk my nails into his skin. He held up his hand and looked at the tiny white crescent-shaped marks on the back of his hand. ‘Air force pilots,’ he said. ‘They say it’s a perfectly safe way to land, but I can never get used to it.’ We had arrived at an airstrip in what seemed to be an endless plain marked by scuffs of dry grass and thorny shrubs. We filed out of the plane and wandered around the airstrip rubbing our eyes and shaking life back into our limbs. The temperature was near freezing, but the air was dry and fresh. After the roar of the aircraft engine it seemed unnaturally silent, as if the cold desert air around us was absorbing all sound.
I walked to the edge of the airstrip, enjoying while I could the crunch of gravel beneath my shoes, and noticed for the first time that the plain was not flat, but was dotted with small gently-sloping mounds of earth, of a uniform height, about half a metre. Like burial mounds, I thought, but immediately dismissed the idea, since there were so many of them, and they were spaced irregularly across so wide and expansive an area. Turning back to the plane, I watched Director Ho help Tian Mei Yun down the steps, whereupon our most promising young pianist spread out his padded coat on the tarmac and lay down on his back. Director Ho stood over Tian and appeared to exchange a few words with him. Tian flailed an arm around, like an insect that had been crushed under a bicycle tyre. The sound of their conversation died before it reached me.
Director Ho left Tian and joined me at the edge of the runway. He held out to me a thin parcel of musical scores, tied with blue ribbon. ‘Bach,’ he said – the word seemed loud and harsh – and then, ‘Brahms and Mozart too,’ each composer’s name bringing forth a puff of steam from his mouth. I took the parcel from him. There was a note attached to the top score with a paper clip. Wan shi ru yi, it said, in Comrade Meretrenko’s uneven and trembling characters. May ten thousand good things fall into your hands. ‘He’s rather late for Chinese New Year,’ Director Ho commented.
In the distance a gearbox chuckled, followed by the low complaint of an engine. We searched the horizon until Director Ho pointed out some low roofs in the distance, and a truck crawling across the desert towards us carrying a large tank. He returned to the prostrate figure of Tian Mei Yun and crouched down on one knee beside him. I turned away from the plane and read through my scores, filling the emptiness around me with the sound of an imaginary violin.
Refuelling took half an hour, after which I helped Director Ho carry Tian, clammy with sweat despite the cold, back to his seat. We took off again, and in the course of the next ten hours our plane hopped across the continent, chasing the retreating sun and performing its dive-bomb landing at airfields in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan to refuel. Towards evening we floated over the Black Sea – sparkling like a sheet of hammered gold – and landed into the setting sun at Bucharest airport.
A squat military truck backed up to our plane in the twilight as we disembarked, and wordlessly the soldiers and the pilots swung their bags into it and climbed aboard. The truck disappeared into the darkness, and the three of us walked to the arrivals hall, where a solitary official studied our passports, holding mine upside down until he found the photograph page, and sighed to himself as if we were some unfortunate fact of life, then raised a heavy blank telephone receiver and spoke softly into it for a minute before stamping our documents and waving us through a pair of solid wooden doors.
We found ourselves alone in a draughty hall with a high vaulted ceiling from which two rows of bare light bulbs hung on long cords, casting about a grainy blue luminance. Tian lowered himself into a corner by a pillar and hung his head between his knees. Director Ho and I stood in the centre of the hall and watched the only other occupant of the place, a fat-cheeked woman who was washing the floor and who punctuated the rhythmic sway of her mop with loud wet sniffing. She made her way directly towards us from the far end of the hall, not acknowledging our presence until her mop brushed Director Ho’s shoes. She stopped her work, straightened her back, sniffed loudly and studied us for a moment, tilting her head to take us in. Then she resumed her mopping, making a detour around us so as to leave us standing on a dry semicircle of floor surrounded by wet slick.
A man dressed in a Mao suit stepped through the main entrance, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light. When he spied us at the far end of the hall he turned quickly on his heels and strode towards us calling out apologies and clapping his hands repeatedly just beneath his chin. We pulled Tian to his feet, and the man introduced himself as an official from the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, before gathering up as much of our luggage as he could fit beneath his arms and leading us into dark night, where a car waited. I sat in the front, wedged between the official and the driver, while in the back Tian slumped across Director Ho’s lap, breathing heavily. Director Ho wiped his brow with a large handkerchief and whispered to him.
‘The Triumphal Arch!’ called our driver, raising a stubby finger in front of my face and wagging it at a floodlit edifice. He proceeded to point out the Great Hall of the Palace, various darkened castles and monasteries, and orthodox churches whose curved turrets reminded me of those dotted around Harbin. I was straining to hear what Director Ho was saying to Tian in the back seat: I caught only a repeated assurance that he would feel better in the morning, and a reminder that all of China’s hopes were resting upon his shoulders.
At the embassy I was shown to a small high-ceilinged room whose single light bulb succumbed with a soft pop after a second of life. In the brief flash of light I registered a narrow cot, a threadbare rug beside it and a small chair and table beneath a window. There was a sheet of notepaper on the table and I picked it up and studied it in the dim moonlight from the window. Something was written on it, but try as I might I could not make it out. I set it down, stowed my case and violin in a corner, and went immediately to bed.
The note turned out to be a set of instructions to the dining hall in the basement, and at first light I made my way through the damp corridors of the building, guided at the last few turns by the smell of cooked cabbage. Director Ho was already there, in his characteristic white cotton shirt with the sleeves loosely rolled, talking with a sallow-faced man wearing a high-collared jacket. They were hunched over a table arrayed with small plates of food and a porcelain tea pot. Director Ho was pouring tea into two glasses and, upon seeing me in the doorway, summoned me and reached for a third glass. The other man reached his hand across the table as I sat down and introduced himself as the ambassador. ‘Welcome to Bucharest,’ he said, his voice thin, with a rising cat-like inflexion. ‘I hope your journey was not too exhausting, and that you slept well.’
Before I could reply, Director Ho had started explaining the schedule for the four days of the George Enescu International Competition: at ten in the morning, formal registration at the Romanian Athenaeum; an hour each day to practice with the accompanist; then the drawing of lots to decide playing order, and then hours of waiting until my turn. Every evening there would be a reception. Tonight’s would be at the Cantacuzino Palace hosted by the Composers’ Union of Romania. He slurped at his glass of tea, and I quickly asked how Tian was. ‘We found a doctor for him at midnight,’ Director Ho said. ‘It is not serious. A bad case of airsickness, that’s all.’
‘Made worse by nerves, perhaps?’ said the ambassador.
‘He has no nerves,’ said Ho. ‘At least, not of that kind.’
At that Tian himself arrived at the door, briefly steadied himself and walked gingerly towards us before lowering himself into a chair. He seemed exhausted by the effort and mumbled a greeting before dropping his head onto his forearms. Director Ho, the ambassador and I exchanged glances. Tian drew breath in long gasps.
It was the ambassador who broke the silence: ‘How do you feel, Comrade?’ He smiled hopefully at me across the table.
‘Not bad,’ said Tian, without raising his head, and then he muttered something I could not hear.
‘What did you say?’ Director Ho asked, placing a hand on Tian’s shoulder. Tian repeated himself, his words again lost beneath his breath, and when none of us responded he raised his head with great effort and looked at each of us in turn, his eyes puffy and his lips cracked and dry.
‘I think I’ll play the Schubert,’ he said, and then dropped his head onto his forearms once more and was silent.
Director Ho covered his face with his hands and drew breath noisily through the gap in his fingers. Then he spread two fingers to one side and looked down with one watery eye at the back of Tian’s bent head. He put his hands on the table and wearily pushed himself to his feet. ‘You must rest first,’ he said to Tian, taking him by the shoulders and gently raising him to his feet. ‘Fu Cong always slept for two hours before a performance.’ I noticed the ambassador’s brows tighten at the mention of Fu Cong, but then he too rose and took one of Tian’s arms and the three of them shuffled from the room and disappeared into the stairwell, leaving me with the debris of their breakfast.
The week that followed was a disaster for Tian. He took no part in the competition, and hardly left his bed until it was time to leave. I performed my pieces – sonatas by Mozart and Brahms, and a Bach partita – over the course of several days, in the Romanian Athenaeum, and then, for the final performance, at the newly built Opera House in central Bucharest. While I played, the panel of judges seemed lost in their own reveries or in conversation with each other, but nevertheless I was awarded second prize, winning it jointly with a blonde American woman about my age who was shadowed throughout the competition by a teetering overstuffed sofa of a woman (her mother, I assumed, come to preserve her from the evils of world communism). My rival shook my hand politely during the presentation ceremony, and, when the time came for photographs, broke out the biggest and brightest set of teeth I had ever seen, and then shut them away again.
After the ceremony Director Ho seized my hand in both of his and would not let go. He made several attempts to speak, but his mind was racing so fast that it seemed unable to turn thoughts into words. When I eventually extracted my hand from his grasp to receive the congratulations of one of the judges, Director Ho stammered, ‘I must cable Beijing immediately,’ and disappeared into the crowd. I barely spoke to him for the rest of the evening, which was spent travelling in a limousine (the Vice-President’s, I was told by our driver) to and from a succession of banquets and receptions.
We were due to leave for home at noon the following day; but at five in the morning there was a loud knock on my door. ‘Comrade Xiao, Comrade Xiao, are you awake?’ It was Director Ho. ‘I must talk to you right now,’ he said. Before I could get out of bed he had opened the door and entered. He turned on the light, and there was a moment of brightness before the bulb again failed. In that brief second of illumination I saw that his clothes and hair were dishevelled. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand.
‘Don’t get up,’ he said, stumbling in the dark towards the chair and scraping it noisily across the floor to my bedside. ‘I have been in constant communication with Beijing since last night,’ he said. ‘Yes, constant communication, including with the private secretary to Zhou Enlai himself. And I have told them that success can only breed more success.’ He paused to lick a drop of spittle from the corner of his mouth. ‘One must climb a mountain to see the plain beyond it. That is what I told them.’
In turn he held up each of his papers so that it caught the meagre window light. The first, he said, was an invitation to travel to Paris to prepare for another competition, a much larger one with more competitors and more famous judges. The second was a ticket for a train that left Bucharest in three hours. Visas had been arranged for the two of us, and letters of introduction. Tian would return home at noon as planned. The competition was two weeks away, he explained, and – of this he seemed immensely pleased – in the interim I would receive tuition from the head of violin performance at the Paris Conservatoire, whom Zhou Enlai knew personally from his time in Paris in the 1920s. ‘And finally,’ he said, laying down the last of his papers, ‘to assure you that I have not forgotten how this all began, I have cabled your parents in Harbin with the news, and on our return I will arrange for you to return home to visit your father.’
We sat in silence for a minute, and I realised that other presences had slipped into the room behind Director Ho and waited in the darkness too: the ambassadors of honour and fear. I sensed my father and mother, and Kasimir, and, strangely, the rabbi’s wife who had blessed me with a kiss. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with these dark shapes in the coolness of the room.
‘You must be tired,’ I said. ‘You have been working on my behalf all night.’
‘You might say that,’ Director Ho said.
‘Perhaps you should get some sleep before we have to leave for the station,’ I said. ‘Please, just leave the papers on the table. I will meet you at the front gate.’
‘Very well,’ he said, his voice from the darkness suddenly edged with sadness. He stood and dragged the chair back towards the table by the window. I turned my face to the wall, and listened to the sound of his breathing as he lingered for a moment by the door.
‘How is Tian?’ I asked as he turned the handle.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen him since the night before last. Don’t worry about him, though; worry about other things, better things.’ He closed the door softly and retreated down the stairs.