Director Ho and I did not board the train to Paris the next day. Something happened in Beijing overnight, some shift in polarity which one could guess at, but never hope to understand fully. The ambassador intercepted me at my door as I emerged with my suitcase and violin. He explained only that things had changed. Director Ho was nowhere to be found, and I dared not ask after him.
I spent the morning with Tian, who had recovered enough to sit at a refectory table, practicing scales along its near edge and quizzing me about the competition, the judges, the audience, and the other competitors. Only when we had exhausted the subject, and he was executing an extended trill with the right hand amongst some breadcrumbs, setting chopsticks rattling atop a bowl beside me, did he look up momentarily and say, ‘Gongxi, gongxi. Congratulations! You must be very proud.’
‘Must I?’
‘Of course you must. Pride is a duty too.’
Director Ho did not appear during the morning. I travelled to the airport with Tian beside me in the car wrapped in a blanket; although he assured me he felt much better, he succumbed to fits of shivering and muttered to himself several times that he was not looking forward to the flight. We waited for several hours in a draughty departure lounge. Our friends the soldiers arrived in the middle of the afternoon and greeted us warmly, asking us how the competition had gone. Tian seemed energised by their arrival: he produced a packet of cigarettes from his luggage and made a performance of staggering around the group clapping each soldier on the back and handing him a cigarette. They were a gift from me, he said, to celebrate my victory. The soldiers surrounded me and we shook hands merrily, filling the room with smoke and laughter.
An airport official announced that our plane was ready and we filed out onto the tarmac. It was not until we were seated on the plane that Director Ho arrived, accompanied by the commanding officer. He waved to Tian and me, but spent the journey wedged into the seat next to the commanding officer, speaking to him occasionally in low tones and not leaving the plane at all during its refuelling stops.
On our return to Shanghai we landed at the civilian airport. The plane pulled off the runway and, with its engines still running, deposited Director Ho, Tian and me, along with our luggage, on a grassy verge, and then turned around and roared back into the air, bound for the military airfield on the other side of the city. We trudged across the grass towards the terminal building, carrying suitcases and my violin in its case. A welcoming party of senior officials, faculty and students from the Conservatory rushed forward onto the tarmac to greet us. Three photographers and a camera crew moved around our flank and started pushing some of the bystanders back to allow them a better shot. A martial tune started up on the airport loudspeaker.
First to shake my hand was the Minister of Culture, a man with a face like a moon cake who beamed at me and crushed my hand in both of his. ‘Comrades, look this way!’ the photographers shouted. We looked, and in the resulting photograph we appear to be fighting over something I am holding in my hand. The bulbs flashed and burned my retinas so that I was blinded as the Minister attempted to present me with a medal and ribbon – ‘Hero of Cultural Labour’, it said – set in its own red velvet case. ‘Comrades, once more!’ Another flash. Another magnesium ghost harrowing the surface of my eyes.
And so it went on. The Mayor of Shanghai gave a speech. Flash! A gentle hug from Comrade Meretrenko and a more manly one from his wife. Flash! Two little girls loaded bunches of flowers into my arms. Flash! Flash! Professor Yu approached me, and his hand wriggled like a snake amongst the mound of foliage I was holding, until our fingers touched; he clasped my hand warmly as his eyes searched out mine, and he announced, with a catch in his throat, that I had brought honour to China. Flash!
The crowd encircled me as we moved towards the gate. My suitcase and violin had been seized by a woman in uniform. I called out for Tian, and was told that Director Ho had already taken him to the infirmary. A car door stood open and I was pushed into the back seat with my burden of flowers. The opposite door opened and Professor Yu slid into the seat. ‘Now,’ he said, as we pulled away, ‘there are things we must discuss.’ He apologised for the confusion over the competition in Paris. Director Ho had been misled about the dates, he explained. The competition was several months away. In the meantime, there were urgent matters he needed me to deal with. The Conservatory needed to prove itself worthy of China and its people, he said, and I would be in the vanguard. If we failed all could be lost. We all needed to play our part. That was all he could say at that moment. More would be known in a few days.
We spent the rest of the journey in silence. I turned away from him to hide the tears that welled up in my eyes. For I was certain that, whatever else this meant, I would not be allowed to return home to visit my parents.
The following day was a Sunday, so I slept late. Ling Ling took me to the Zhujiaojiao Gardens and we strolled arm in arm along the canals, and sat upstairs in the Moon Pavilion. She fed me sweets and oolong tea and, encased in an aromatic haze, I answered her questions about Bucharest, the finer points of powered flight, and Tian’s illness. In the afternoon I returned to my room and as I wearily ascended the stairs I received the greetings of several of my Russian neighbours, among them Pavel and Raya who pressed a small parcel of dried fruit into my hand. On the top floor I flung myself at my bed and did not wake until the following morning.
Ling Ling had disappeared from our room before dawn, and I only met up with her at the gate of the Conservatory. She was bent under the weight of a large item in a canvas cover strapped to her back. ‘A piano accordion,’ she explained. ‘They won’t have any pianos where we are going.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘I have only just arrived back.’
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘But read that, and you may have some idea what is going on.’
She nodded towards the main door of the Conservatory upon which was pinned the revised text of Mao’s article, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’. I read the document, as usual straining to pierce the familiar recitations of Marxist principle and reach through to some shadowy truth beyond.
What would become apparent was that the words of Mao’s original article, after some clarification, were now revealed as censuring the untethered thoughts of intellectuals rather than encouraging public criticism and debate. How absurd that anyone had thought otherwise! In the weeks that followed we came to understand that the Hundred Flowers Movement was over, the scent of the new blooms having proved too pungent for the Party, and the criticisms of its cadres so trenchant and irrefutable as to be unpatriotic. Those who had spoken out were clearly Rightists in temperament, regardless of the sacrifices they may have made during the revolution or the Long March. In Shanghai, intellectuals were publicly shamed: some publishing retractions and self-criticisms, others, we would learn in the months and years to come, simply disappearing. There was whispered speculation that from the start the purpose of the exercise had been to entice ‘bad elements’ to declare themselves publicly. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but I recall somehow knowing all of this – not its detail, of course, but its essence – as sunlight struck the paper nailed to the Conservatory door and the characters started to swim in a pool of brightness: a surface luminous and painful to behold, but with depths of meaning refracted and elusive, shooting this way and that like tiny fish under the surface of a pond.
Ling Ling was at my shoulder. ‘Tian was at the Director’s house last night, so he may know more.’
‘Tian is better?’
‘Well enough, so it seems.’ In a low voice, she related what she had been told the night before as I slept – that Director Ho was to be severely censured for praising Fu Cong and his father, Fu Lei; that the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth was now postponed; that the whole Conservatory was under suspicion, and the faculty had decided that, to re-establish its revolutionary credentials, all students would be assigned to ‘cultural labouring’ tasks amongst the workers and peasants for the remainder of the summer. We were to pack up our instruments and a small bag of personal items and report to the Conservatory courtyard at midday.
‘I want to stash this thing in the common room,’ Ling Ling said, hoisting the piano accordion onto her back. ‘Then let’s go home and pack.’
*
We joined the crowd in the courtyard at midday. Tian and the Director arrived together, Tian with a bulging satchel over his shoulder, a cello case in one hand, and a locked metal case in the other. Director Ho greeted me warmly and handed me a copy of the People’s Daily. The front page carried a report of the competition in Bucharest, referring to my ‘victory’. I had fought bravely against great odds, it read. I had outsmarted my opponents, and had completed my prize-winning performance with the strains of ‘The East is Red’ ringing in my ears, a feat I found difficult to imagine. There was no mention of the American woman, and the winner of the violin section of the competition was identified only as ‘a Ukrainian’. Nor was there any mention of Tian Mei Yun, the pianist who had spent the entire trip staring at the ceiling of his room.
The Director took me aside and laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘Please accept my apologies,’ he said, ‘but for the time being I cannot arrange . . .’
‘I understand,’ I interjected.
He dropped his head. ‘It is out of my hands, I am sorry.’ With that he disappeared inside the main building.
Tian started to explain that the metal case was full of sheet music, and that he had spent the previous evening going through Director Ho’s collection, selecting music that they thought would be fitted for the task of ‘cultural labouring’. Ling Ling asked if he knew our destination, but we were immediately called to attention by Ding Shangde, the Deputy Director, who stood up on a chair and read out a list assigning each student to one of three teams. I was grouped with Ling Ling, Tian and a dozen other students, and Ding announced that we were to join the Hainan Autonomous Prefecture Cultural Work Team. A truck would carry us and our luggage to the station, where we would catch the train south to Guangzhou, and from there a ferry to the island of Hainan in the South China Sea, where we would help teach socialist principles to villagers from the Miao ethnic minority.
The train journey lasted twenty hours, and when our fellow passengers discovered that we were musicians on our way to join a cultural work team we felt obliged to put on an impromptu performance. Ling Ling strapped on her piano accordion, and we sang our way through the standard repertoire of revolutionary songs, finishing with the chorus from ‘The Red Detachment of Women’, which many of the passengers knew by heart. Afterwards, a young man from Guangzhou attached himself to us, insisting on singing for us, in a voice shaky with some deep infirmity in his chest, a traditional song from his home village complete with rather feminine hand gestures and a sad tilt of cheek and eyebrow. Then he shared around cigarettes, and told Tian what he knew about the Miao people while Ling Ling and I dozed. ‘Miao men share their wives with guests,’ he said, bending his head towards Tian, ‘especially those who bring a gift of rice wine.’
‘And are Miao women worth a bottle of rice wine?’ Tian asked.
‘Definitely,’ the young man said, ‘in some cases, two bottles.’ Ling Ling shuffled around on her hard seat, and I saw the shadow of a smile on her lips. I glanced discreetly at Tian, who was nodding earnestly to his informant.
Dropping his voice further, the man from Guangzhou went on. ‘They stand to urinate,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘And they believe that regular sexual congress enables them to work as hard as men.’
‘How regular?’ Tian asked.
‘Twice a day.’
‘Twice a day. Indeed?’
‘Yes, and more often in winter. Three or four times a day.’
‘When do they get time to work as hard as men? And is all this sexual congress perhaps the reason why the men themselves have no more energy to work?’
The young man’s face clouded, and he ignored Tian’s questions and continued. ‘But beware, because every five years the women form a hunting pack and castrate one of the men from a rival village – or a visitor who has offended the village headman – and then they cook up his testicles in a special soup that is fed to all girl infants under five years old.’
‘I will be extra careful, then,’ Tian said, looking around to wink at me. ‘Are we approaching the five year mark?’
The young man could not say, but he passed on his last piece of wisdom: that each March, Miao youth who had come of age serenaded each other from opposite sides of the valley, young men facing east and young women facing west. Using only the sound of their voices, they paired off, and arranged to meet in the forest on the valley floor to make love. There were many stories of mistaken identity, he said, and while some spawned epics or farces, most of them ended as tragedies. Tian thanked the young man for his advice, and after he left the three of us fell into a prolonged fit of giggling.
The train rolled on into the night. I lapsed into a deep sleep, waking to find that I had slumped down onto Tian’s shoulder. I saw Ling Ling on the seat opposite, looking at me with an expression I had never seen before – a sad, reflective look I would not have thought was part of her repertoire – and immediately went back to sleep. When I awoke next, Ling Ling was gone. I was still leaning against Tian, and discovered to my horror a wet patch on his jacket sleeve next to where my mouth had been. Tian looked down and noticed it too. Dui bu qi, I whispered. Mei shi, he whispered back. It’s nothing.
The train stopped at a town near Canton, and the three of us got off for half an hour and bought some food at the station cafeteria. Tian complained of a sore neck, the result of a night spent pinned awkwardly against the side of the carriage. He said he had not wanted to wake me or to try to move me in my sleep. I told him he was too polite, and noticed that Ling Ling scowled at him when she thought I was not looking.
On the ferry to Hainan we slept on the deck, amongst soldiers returning home and peasants transporting breeding pigs to the island. What bunks there were below deck seemed to be occupied by officers, factory managers and Party officials. We were met at the dock by the leader of the Cultural Work Team, and transported by bus to bunker-like quarters on the edge of a village in the foothills of the main mountain range. There we were introduced to the rest of the team, an assortment of dancers, actors, and singers from every corner of China. We learned that our first task was to prepare for a celebration of Miao traditional culture (with references to sex and feudal values replaced with socialist messages). The dancers and singers were already rehearsed, but the team’s musicians had been reassigned to another part of Hainan, so we were to fill the gap. We began our preparation immediately.
That night Tian Mei Yun showed us the contents of his locked case. The whole party gathered under a tree in the courtyard, and Tian released the lock using a key hung on a chain around his neck, and one by one placed before us his treasure of musical scores. None of the titles were in Chinese; instead, there were titles in languages Tian identified as French and English, as well as some in Russian (which I carefully avoided translating). For the most part, they were works by familiar composers; but there were some I had not heard of: Bartók, Kodály, Hindemith. There were also some scores from which the front cover had been ripped, along with the few centimetres at the top of the first page where the composer and title had been. I waited for someone to ask Tian to explain why these scores were damaged, but nobody seemed to want to know.
We practised Miao folk songs for the next two days, before being loaded into two buses again and heading up into the mountains. For the next two weeks we slept in empty storehouses, barns, school rooms and peasant huts, ate whatever food we were offered, travelled along narrow mountain roads by day, and every evening set up our stage in a new village and sent messengers to summon the Miao villagers to our show, which we performed in the light of hurricane lamps on poles. Our audiences were no doubt happy for some entertainment, but must have been irritated to find that attendance was compulsory, and amused or insulted to discover that the evening’s fare was to watch Han Chinese dress up in Miao costumes and present sanitised versions of Miao songs and dances to the descendents of their authors, accompanied by traditional melodies, but with Western harmony and instrumentation.
On our return from the mountains, we were presented with a special challenge. We were to be sent to a district where villagers had destroyed a newly installed electrical system, believing it contained devils. A political team had already held mass meetings with the villagers and explained revisionism and its Maoist critique, but to no avail. The sabotage continued. Could we put together a performance about the advantages of electrification?
We had the performance worked out within three days. The dancers and singers would act out the story of how the peasants lamented having only oil-lamps for light; how the benefits of electrical power were recognised by Mao Zedong; how scientists discovered ways of capturing electrons; how they sent out messengers to the sky and the streams to convince them to lend their powers to assist the villagers to modernise, and then gathered in a harvest of electrons into their storehouse of transformers and wires; how electricity flowed down the wires and into houses and health clinics and factories, creating light and animating machines which milled grains, sewed sacks and warm clothing, and assembled guns with which to fight the enemies of socialism.
Tian assumed the role of musical director. We would break away from Mozart and Beethoven, he said, and instead use French, Russian and Hungarian composers. One of Bartók’s Rumanian Dances represented the sufferings of the pre-electrified peasants. A march from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet accompanied the entrance of Chairman Mao and the scientists. Another Bartók dance and a movement from a string quartet by Ravel, played pizzicato, represented, in turn, the search for compliant electrons amongst the mysterious elemental powers of nature, and then the machines jumping into life. I was to be the soloist, accompanied by the rest of the ensemble or sometimes just by Ling Ling and her piano accordion.
To indicate the happy electrons leaving the generation plant and making their way along the wires, Tian chose a sprightly dance tune. It was one of the damaged scores, and so was without a name. This piece proved to be the crowd favourite when we visited the recalcitrant village itself and performed our ‘electrification suite’. (I heard it again years later, in Paris, when a friend took me to a competition for young musicians in which her son was playing the violin. When the boy played the very piece that we had used to try to win over the hearts of suspicious Miao tribesmen, I asked my friend what music her son was playing. ‘Tu ne le connais pas?’ she said, taken aback in that Gallic way. ‘Mais c’est le Golliwog’s Cake Walk de Claude Debussy.’)
The sabotage of the electrical system ceased, and, encouraged by the ineluctable power of scientific music, we turned out several more ‘suites’ over the next two months, some in support of ‘goods’ like family planning (a restful piece by Elgar played around the actors representing responsible parents who ensured adequate spacing between their children, while the stubbornly ignorant parents were dogged by an irregular march by Shostakovich), and others against a variety of ‘bads’, including gambling on cockfights (with music by Bartók), smoking opium (Hindemith) and consulting traditional healers (Kodály). By the time we were summoned back to Shanghai in September, every score in Tian’s case had been copied, reordered, transcribed to a different key, slowed to a more useful pace or manipulated in other ways until it had found its true vocation as a means of promoting hygienic living and hard work among the Miao.
*
A few days before we were due to return to Shanghai, Tian called me out of a practice session and explained that we had a small task to attend to. He was carrying the case with Director Ho’s scores and two straw hats. ‘You’ll need one of these,’ he said, handing me a hat. ‘It’s hot today.’
He led me down to the waterfront past racks of drying fish, to a jetty where we boarded a flat-bottomed fishing boat. An old man sat at the helm beneath a flapping cloth awning, and once we were settled on the boards above the fish-hold he pushed the boat away from the dock with a pole and pulled the rip-cord on an outboard motor several times until it fired. Within minutes we had left the harbour behind and were skimming around the coast beyond the reef line.
Tian sat in the bow with the case by his feet. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.
‘I am forbidden to tell you,’ he said.
‘What’s the point of being secretive? I will find out very soon. Unless you plan to blindfold me.’
‘We are going to a village along the coast. You can only get there by sea.’
‘And why are you taking me?’ I asked.
He refused to answer, and turned his face upwards to catch the breeze.
‘Why are you taking me?’
He continued to ignore me. I pulled my hat firmly over my eyes to protect myself from the dazzle of the sunlight on the water, and settled into a drowse. After almost an hour the boatman throttled back the engine, manoeuvred past some rocks and tied up at the jetty of a small village whose dozen or so houses were built on stilts over the waters of a lagoon. The boatman helped us from the boat and led us along a rickety boardwalk, around drying nets and fish traps, patting local children affectionately on the shoulder, until he stopped at one of the houses, and rapped on its doorpost to announce our arrival. He introduced the village chief, and we were welcomed warmly and urged to sit and share a meal of fish and rice. This we ate in silence, and then our boatman spoke to the village chief in the local dialect and bade us farewell with smiles and bows and handshakes, assuring Tian he would return to collect us before nightfall.
The chief led us onshore and for half an hour we trailed behind his grass-sided shoes along a narrow path that wound through a mangrove swamp and up the side of a small bluff before descending into an adjacent bay. He took us to a solitary hut by the shore and pointed to a small adjacent jetty, speaking to Tian in his dialect.
‘What’s he saying?’ I asked.
‘I think he’s saying that this is where our boatman will pick us up,’ he answered. ‘I hope that’s what he meant.’
The chief beckoned us inside the hut. It was unfurnished and damp and smelled of rotting vegetation. The chief pulled back several of the fibrous mats that covered the wooden floor and then squatted down and showed us a trapdoor set into the floor. This he lifted and together we peered into a small cavity, around half a metre square and the same depth. I sat down on a mat for a rest.
Tian sniffed the air and ran his hand around the inside lip of the cavity. ‘Too damp,’ he said. ‘Things will rot in here. I asked for somewhere dry.’
The chief shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms outwards in a gesture of misapprehension or indifference.
‘Do you have nothing else? Nothing drier?’ Tian said. The man shrugged again. ‘Do you even speak Mandarin?’ Tian asked, and looked to me appealingly.
‘I thought I was just here for the ride,’ I said, and Tian turned down his lower lip in a clownish gesture, so I huffed loudly, got to my feet and addressed myself to the chief: ‘Vy govorite po-russki?’ The chief contracted his brows and gave a tilt of the head. ‘Well, I tried my best,’ I said to Tian. ‘He doesn’t speak Russian either.’
The chief turned and stood in the doorway in the mottled shade of the palm trees. He pointed towards the south, where the sun was now beating down on the surface of the bay. ‘About a day’s journey under sail,’ he said, in perfectly adequate Mandarin, ‘there is a small island where my uncle would spend the summer. There is an old mine on the island – nickel, I think. There are some concrete buildings there. It is away from the sea, very dry.’
Tian sighed. ‘That’s too far,’ he said. ‘We only have today. Is there nothing in your village?’
‘Anything dry in our village?’ the man laughed. ‘We live on stilts over a swamp – or did you not notice that?’
‘This will have to do then,’ Tian huffed. ‘Thank you, you may leave us.’
The chief remained motionless, until Tian, remembering himself, reached into his pocket and withdrew a small roll of bank notes. ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said, pressing them into the chief’s palm. ‘And for your silence.’
The chief nodded and withdrew.
As we secured the trapdoor and arranged the reed mats on top of it Tian explained to me that the scores were not safe in Shanghai, and that he had promised Director Ho that he would conceal them in Hainan as soon as possible after we arrived, but that circumstances had intervened, and they were needed for our work here. This was our last opportunity to fulfil the Director’s original instructions.
‘Why did you need to bring me?’ I repeated.
‘I needed a second witness,’ Tian said. ‘In case anything happens to me, you will know where to come. I was going to bring Ling Ling, but I’m not sure I can trust her.’
‘Her loyalty?’
‘Her sense of direction.’
‘Who else knows about this?’
‘Only the Director,’ Tian said. ‘It is our little secret, yes?’
We sat on the jetty for several hours waiting for our boatman to arrive. The sun dipped towards the horizon. I suggested that we return to the village, as the boatman may have forgotten where he was to meet us; but Tian would have none of it. ‘As soon as we do that, he will appear here, and then we will be lost,’ he said. We did retrace our steps to the foot of the bluff, however, and he pointed out a tree he had spotted on our way in which was laden with red green globes. ‘I think it’s a kind of mango,’ he said, and he hoisted me up onto a low branch from where I plucked several of the fleshy fruit and threw them down to him. They were under-ripe, but edible, and we returned to the jetty with twenty or so wrapped up in Tian’s shirt, and consumed half of them as a cool wind sprang up off the sea, the waves sank into a dark grey shimmer and a half-moon emerged from over the bluff.
As the sun set we retreated to the hut, lay on the grass mats and talked quietly in the darkness. A family of small bats assembled under the eaves, firing angry glances at us from amidst their leathery folds. Tian told me about growing up amidst privilege in Suzhou and Shanghai, about his family’s servants, and their holidays in California, and about the years he had spent during the Civil War with his sister and mother at his uncle’s large French Provincial house in the outskirts of Hanoi. He told me how no matter where the family was they always carried his cello and arranged for a piano to be available for him, and in Hanoi even found him a tutor, a white-suited French paterfamilias who was married, it appeared, to two Vietnamese sisters. Tian asked me about my childhood, and I was only a few minutes into my story when I noticed his breathing soften and become regular. I continued speaking softly for a few minutes, finding that I was myself interested in listening to the sound of my own voice giving an account of my childhood, and stopping only when I started to explain my father’s illness and realised how much I missed listening to him talk about how his latest symptoms had unmasked further curiosities of his body and his mind.
The sea breeze held up for several hours and then died away. I drifted in and out of sleep, unable to find comfort in the humid, salty air, lacking a pillow and in my dozing mind transfiguring the noises of the forest around us into a convocation of snakes and insects and rodents drawn to our hut by the scent of warm bodies. I told myself I would not be harmed if I lay perfectly still.
As the sky brightened towards dawn I half awoke and found Tian beside me, very close, leaning on his elbow and stroking my face with his right hand. His breath was warm on my face and he began kissing me – on the cheekbone, on the tip of my nose, and on my chin. I reached up my right hand and awkwardly held the back of his head. I grasped his skull through his wiry hair and pulled his face closer, so that his kisses were harder, so that they pressed through my skin and onto the muscle and tissue beneath. I pulled his head down towards my neck and my shoulders and my collarbone, and pressed it down again, further, onto the mound of my breast. We were tugging at our clothing, and then I felt the spidery warmth of his fingers moving down over my stomach, and soon I was holding him over me, grasping his narrow hips, welcoming him, claiming him. I closed my eyes and felt the movement of his bones, hard beneath his soft flesh, and suddenly I felt that I was holding some creature that was not Tian, or was only partly him, like the coiled snakes of happiness and grief, for he was letting out a sound like sobbing from somewhere deep within his chest. And then there was only wetness, mine and his. And he was saying, over and over, ‘Dui bu qi, dui bu qi, dui bu qi. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Then he succumbed to the stillness of our hut, and I became suddenly aware of the harsh scent of our sweat and the damp gushing of the sea at our feet and nothing more.
For several minutes Tian’s body hung over me, the heels of his hands pressing into the mat either side of my head, his torso sagging downwards, drips of sweat falling from his ribcage onto my stomach, and his head lolling from side to side so that his moist hair brushed my temple and his breath caressed my sternum with prickly gusts of heat. I thought suddenly of the scores in the case beneath us and of the need to protect their delicate dryness from this wet that would dampen and rot away the staves and the notes. So I rolled Tian onto his back beside me and he watched as I gathered my clothes. I walked down to the sea and edged my way forward into the gentle morning waves, clutching my arms across my chest, my toes testing each boulder on the seafloor as I progressed.
After I had immersed myself several times I picked my way back to the shore and sat on a large rock, naked, drawing my knees up under my chin and watching the sun rise out of the sea. Tian walked past me without speaking and made his fumbling way into the water. Rather than watch him wash, I dressed and returned to the hut. I pulled back the floor mats and opened the trapdoor. Director Ho’s case sat snugly in the cavity. I closed the trapdoor and covered it with mats once more.
I heard Tian’s voice calling out and, moving to the doorway of the hut, saw him dancing around on one foot as he tugged on a trouser leg, and then clutching his belt ends with one hand as he waved the other arm above his head. In the distance I saw that the little blue fishing boat had come around the point and was making its way through a gap in the breakers about half a kilometre offshore. Tian waved again after he had buttoned his shirt, and watched as the boatman approached our tumbledown jetty, gunned the engine for the last time and threw a rope around the largest upright. He beckoned to us, and I went to the back of the hut to gather up the remainder of our fruit from the night before. I found them covered with insects crawling happily amongst their gelatinous pulp, and left them where they were.
When I reached the shore, Tian was ahead of me, picking his way carefully along the uneven boards of the jetty. I followed him, steadying myself on the rotting posts, and soon we were in the boat and heading back out through the passage into the open sea. Tian sat in the bow of the boat, humming to himself and turning from time to time to give me a mischievous smile. I sat at the stern beside the boatman. He asked how we had passed the night. He seemed happy with my curt reply and left me to my own thoughts for the duration of the journey.
As Tian and I walked together through the fish market to the barracks where we were billeted, he whispered to me, ‘You will keep our secret, won’t you?’
‘What secret is that?’ I said. ‘About Director Ho’s scores, you mean?’
‘Yes . . . and also about what happened,’ Tian said.
‘What did happen?’ I asked. ‘Tell me.’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s a secret.’ We walked on through the throng of townsfolk going about their morning business, and as we approached our lodgings he said, ‘What I mean is: you won’t tell Ling Ling. Will you?’
‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘As long as the two of us know where the case is hidden, there is no need to tell anyone else. That was your plan, wasn’t it? As you yourself said, these are things she cannot be trusted with.’ I turned away from him and quickened my pace so that I reached the barracks several minutes before him.
*
Two days later we returned to the mainland and boarded the train to Shanghai. At the Conservatory little appeared to have changed. Classes continued as normal and Ho Luting remained the Director, although it was rumoured that only intervention from high up in the Party had saved him. Nevertheless, he was rarely seen around the Conservatory, and his duties were for the most part performed by Yu Huiyong, who now had the title of Adjunct Deputy Director of the Conservatory, in which capacity he led daily one-hour political instruction sessions.
‘Western music is bound up in a system of social snobbery,’ Yu explained at the first of these sessions I attended. ‘Not only do Chinese listeners not understand it, but the working people of the West do not understand it, and a great many bourgeoisie only pretend to understand to show how civilised they are. So-called abstract music – music in which each section is simply identified by a technical description and a number (Symphony No. 4, Adagio in G, and so on) – is inseparably associated with the establishment of capitalist production relations and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Untitled music is the means by which bourgeois composers conceal the class content of their works.’
Yu’s ideas severely threatened the teaching repertoire. What music could be taught in the Conservatory? the faculty asked, and in response Yu posted on the main door a list of music that passed the ideological tests: the Yellow River Concerto, the Shajiabang Symphony, the opera A Storm on the Yangtze, and a long list of choral works and songs: The Red Lantern, Ambushed from All Sides, Chairman Mao Arrives at Tiananmen, Transfer to the Front-Lines after Graduation and Going up to Peach Peak Three Times. There was immediate chaos. Were these the only pieces of music that could be taught or performed? Was the whole Western corpus to be discarded as bourgeois? What about Soviet or Eastern European music? And what of classical Chinese music? Of Three Variations on a Plum Blossom? Or Chinese folk music? Was the music composed after the Revolution of 1911 acceptable? Or was everything composed before the Communist victory of 1949 to be condemned as feudal as well? And what exactly were the principles that should be applied to distinguish socialist music from bourgeois music?
Some students made a bonfire of suspect sheet music on the front steps of the Conservatory, and refused to play anything that was not on Yu’s list. A few members of the faculty, in mock zealotry, queried some of the items on Yu’s list for having reactionary or revisionist tendencies. The Soviet advisors withdrew into an angry silence.
Director Ho remained silent throughout, having let it be known that he was busy composing an oratorio based on the Long March of 1934. Yu was forced to post revised lists on his door and entertain earnest delegations of students seeking clarification. Glinka and Haydn and Beethoven were rehabilitated, followed shortly after by Mozart and Chopin and (it was rumoured), at the playful instigation of the Soviet advisors, by their obscure compatriots Viktor Kosenko, Serafim Tulikov and Modest Tabachnikov. Rumour and counter-rumour circulated. Brahms and Strauss were sanctioned one morning, but banned again by evening. Schubert and Rimsky-Korsakov suffered the same fate on another day. Borodin came and went within the space of a few hours. The stock of each composer rose and fell at the prompting of an invisible hand, and outside the practice rooms in the evening we would listen nervously to what was being played within, lest anyone lapse into some reactionary arpeggios or bourgeois atonality.
One morning we found that all the lists on the main door had been torn down and replaced by a single-page manifesto entitled ‘Four Principles towards a Socialist Theory of Music’. Professor Yu did not claim to be the author of the principles, although it was written in his own hand, but he later hinted that they had originated from a source high up in the Party. We were summoned to the refectory to hear him read them out and urge us to apply them to our work without any more bickering:
1. China’s musicians must find a course independent of both Western bourgeois standards and native feudalism. The foreign tiger and the native tiger are both ferocious, and we must not be bound to them.
2. Western music is politically unhealthy. Madame Butterfly describes the shaming of Japanese women by American imperialism; and La Traviata dignifies prostitution. Capitalism’s music is headed for destruction, and you do not want to die along with it.
3. However, Chinese folk songs are not a satisfactory basis for creating a new musical culture. When the Ministry of Culture encouraged folk songs, no one sang revolutionary songs any more.
4. International musical competitions are capitalist at the core. Nevertheless, China does receive some benefit from the standpoint of international relations. China should establish an international festival of Asian, African and Latin American music, and then withdraw from Western competitions.
The principles were, I thought, from first to last extremely unhelpful; but to my amazement Yu’s announcement fostered a kind of bemused euphoria. Faculty members resumed teaching Western music. ‘First, master Mozart and Beethoven,’ they said, ‘and then surpass it. And as regards China’s international standing, once we have carried home every trophy from the West, we will establish our own competitions.’ Within days of Yu’s announcement Beethoven and Brahms were again heard throughout the halls of the Conservatory, and as they entered the building each morning many students glanced ruefully at the scorch-marks left on the front steps by the bonfire of precious scores.
In the Foreign Teachers’ Building the new plumbing system appeared to work no better than the old one had. There was dust everywhere, and for a few days we had to step over a pile of perfectly serviceable lead pipes that lay athwart the entrance way awaiting removal. Madame Huang took me to the roof of the building that backed onto mine, and showed me the small removable panel that had been installed by the fire escape on the third floor. She explained that a small cavity had been created in the internal wall of Raya and Pavel’s apartment so that I would be able to climb down the fire escape, remove the panel, and crawl into the wall cavity to position myself at more or less the exact centre of the apartment: the bedroom would be to my right; the living room would be in front of me; and the bathroom, should I care to listen, would be to my left. The space had been equipped with a small shaded light to help me write down my notes.
Madame Huang explained that a reception for all the Soviet advisors had been organised for that evening to allow me to familiarise myself with my new listening post. Kirill was back in Shanghai, she said, and we were eagerly awaiting his next visit.
‘Regarding your request to visit your parents,’ she said, pursing her lips as if she had just swallowed something sour, ‘I am afraid that is not convenient right now. You are too important to us here, and nobody else can do your work.’ She placed her hand on mine and gave my fingers a squeeze. ‘Be assured that the Party is looking after your father,’ she said. ‘I personally have spoken with the Party Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Government. He is well connected in Beijing.’
That night I climbed from the window at the top of the stairwell onto the fire escape, where I stole a quick glance at the stars and the moon, stepped as quietly as I could down the steep metal staircase (ducking when it passed the window of an apartment), slid open the panel on the third floor, edged into the darkness, and settled myself into position. The workmen had installed a platform that I could lie on, about two metres above the floor, and ventilation grilles that circulated air and enabled me to see part of the living room and the bedroom.
Over the nights that followed, Pavel and Raya resumed their conjugal life, speaking to each other less, but with an odd courtesy. Every night they ate the meal Raya had prepared, and then Pavel cleaned up in the kitchen and they read books or newspapers and smoked cigarettes before going to bed. They rarely talked at length, and when they did they soon found themselves sliding towards an angry exchange and immediately pulled back. I wondered if they had some inkling that I was there listening to them; but then concluded that they had simply formed a truce, agreeing that arguments that could not be won were not worth starting.
The leaves were falling from the trees by the time Kirill returned to the building. I was returning from the Conservatory on my bicycle at dusk one day, and as I turned into our street my path was illuminated from behind by the headlights of a car. It tailed me for the last hundred metres, the street being too narrow to permit it to pass. I parked my bicycle and saw Kirill reversing out of the back seat onto the kerb, setting onto the sidewalk bottles of vodka and wine, a pile of new books tied up with string, and cartons of cigarettes which, later that evening, I would recognise as the same pungent-smelling ones I had watched Raya smoke at her door the night I had been trapped in the apartment. I offered to help him and he gave me a smile and thanked me as I picked up his stack of books and preceded him up to the third floor. I deliberately continued past Pavel and Raya’s door, but he called me back. I put the books in the doorway as he knocked, and then, without waiting for any further acknowledgement, I ran up the remaining flights of stairs, throwing my violin onto my bed and climbing as fast as I could down the fire escape and into my listening post. The first thing I heard was the scraping of a chair.
‘You will excuse me,’ Kolya was saying as I put my ear to the grille. ‘Some paperwork cries out for me upstairs.’
‘How can you think of going, Kolya?’ Raya said. ‘Our guest has just arrived. How rude of you!’
‘And see, I have brought the Moskovskaya,’ Kirill said. ‘Ten bottles, no less. If you go, Pavel will drink the lot and you will have none. Here, Raya, bring glasses.’
‘Please, no,’ Kolya said. ‘I need to work. I can’t drink and work. That is a skill I have never learned.’
‘You have grown pale over the summer,’ Kirill lamented. ‘Are you working too hard? Have you been fasting? A single man like you needs some company. Stay a while.’
‘I have been enjoying your company since we sucked at our mothers’ breasts,’ Kolya said. ‘I am not short of your company.’
‘Pavel will be back soon with some delicacies from across the river,’ Raya said, and through the grille I saw her standing behind Kolya, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing him back into a chair. She was mouthing words to Kirill, who sat across from Kolya, below my line of sight.
‘What is Pavel doing over there? Is he playing provisioner now?’ Kolya said as he squirmed beneath Raya’s weight.
‘Mitrofan has been taking him on his little excursions to show him the ropes,’ Raya said. ‘You knew that, surely. He needs to get the measure of our Jewish friends before Mitrofan leaves.’
‘What measurements is he taking?’ Kolya said, struggling free of Raya and pushing his chair back. ‘This fraternisation with undesirables is . . . I will have a word with him, Kirill, I promise.’
‘Don’t fret, my friend,’ said Kirill. ‘Just stay with us and eat.’
At that moment a noise was heard on the stairs. ‘Ah, Pavel! Pavel, is that you?’ Kirill called.
‘Kirill Mikhailovic! What a surprise!’ Pavel called from the entrance. ‘I didn’t know you were back in Shanghai.’
‘I really must go,’ Kolya said. ‘Once I have finished my report I will come back.’
‘Promise me you will,’ Raya said. ‘Let me find your jacket.’ Raya and Kolya left the room and I could hear them in the vestibule talking in hushed tones. Pavel, meanwhile, entered the room and placed a canvas bag on the table as Kirill rose from his chair.
‘Welcome, Kirill Mikhailovic,’ Pavel said, leaning across the table to embrace Kirill. ‘It is good to have you back. How are things in Moscow? Does the spring continue?’
‘The spring continues, yes,’ said Kirill. ‘This winter could be the best spring we have had in years.’
‘Oh, how I love the way you diplomats talk. I love everything about you diplomats.’
‘You should show some restraint,’ said Kirill. ‘Now, what is in the bag?’
‘Not much. Some cod liver salad, a brace of roast pigeons, some chanterelles, and some more knydl, I particularly like their knydl.’
‘And tell me about your work,’ Kirill said, as he helped Pavel remove the food from his canvas bag.
‘My work?’
‘It’s what you are here for. Isn’t it?’
‘My work proceeds as well as I can hope. We lost the repertoire last year, you may recall, but now it is mostly back in fashion.’
‘But what are your students composing?’
‘Shit mainly, if you must know,’ Pavel said. ‘Read Kolya’s reports. I am teaching my students to write song cycles for the peasants on the collective farms. You know, titles like “Chickenshit is fine, but pigshit is the better manure” and “Chairman Mao says to eat greens is glorious”.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘Read Kolya’s reports.’ Pavel folded the canvas bag and put it under the table.
‘No, I want to hear it from you.’
‘I am not in the mood. Now help me set this food out. Where is Raya? Where are you, Raya?’
‘I am here.’ Raya returned to the room, and she and Pavel busied themselves with plates and cutlery.
‘Do we need knives?’
‘Yes.’
In the darkness of my hideout I scrawled notes with a pencil on a small notepad and strained to hear every word. Does he know? I asked myself. Does Pavel know?
Over their meal Kirill asked about Raya’s work (a study of similarities between the folk music of Sichuan and the Soviet Asian republics), and she in turn quizzed him about the illness of the Soviet Consul in Shanghai, which was rumoured to be life-threatening. They swapped details of their respective travels from the previous summer: Pavel in Moscow, Raya in Kiev with her sister, and Kirill in London, Washington, Paris and Kiev before returning to Moscow.
‘You should have told me you were going to be in Kiev,’ Raya said. ‘My sister and her husband had a dacha by the river, about a half hour from the city.’
‘I had only two days there, and barely left the Foreign Ministry. Do you know they have now installed an elevator in that beautiful stairwell? At the old building on Mykhailivska Square? It only has three storeys, for God’s sake! An elevator for only three storeys! Kirichenko is behind it, Khrushchev’s man. A monstrous thing, and I refused to use it. It is a gilded cage with clanking gates and sagging wires that drags you from the bowels of the building and deposits you at the door of Kirichenko’s office.’
‘Is it that you prefer to walk for your health?’ Pavel asked, ‘Or are you afraid someone will cut the wires and you will drop three storeys to your death?’
‘Both; neither. What disturbs me is that it looks like a prison cell, and I have watched people as they ride up and down. They stop talking to each other and a look of vacancy comes into their eyes, as if their souls had taken the stairs while their bodies take the elevator. That is what scares me.’
‘You are very amusing, Kirill,’ Raya said. ‘Here, drink.’
‘To vacancy,’ Pavel said. ‘To elevation. Bud’mo.’
‘Bud’mo.’
My knees and back started to ache. My small cavity filled with the smell of their cigarettes and I held my hand over my mouth and nose, closed my eyes to stop them watering, and lay in the darkness listening. Does he know? I asked myself again and again.
‘Tell us more about your travels in the United States, Kirill’ said Pavel. ‘What news? Did they turn you into a capitalist?’
‘Indeed, not. It is too hot there, too humid, at least in Washington. I do not understand how they get anything done. Who has the energy to engage in free enterprise when drenched in sweat? Give me London, where it rained without ceasing, or Berlin, where the leaves are falling everywhere,’ Kirill replied. ‘As for my mission, it is accomplished for the time being.’
‘And my friend, Yudin, in Beijing? How is he?’
‘Ah, that is a different matter altogether, I’m afraid,’ Kirill said. ‘Yudin is panicking, let me be frank. The ground slips away beneath him, and he fears he will be replaced and sent home in disgrace.’
‘What has he done?’
Kirill lit a cigarette, and then, remembering himself, offered them to his hosts, lighting theirs with the glowing end of his.
‘He has soured relationships with the leadership there,’ he said. ‘We have it on good intelligence that the PLA is planning to invade the channel islands off Taiwan. We don’t know when, exactly. That’s probably as far as they will go, since their purpose is merely to bring the US Seventh Fleet into play.’
‘And who does that help?’
‘Not us, anyway. It is well known that the Americans have Matador missiles in Taiwan. One of them is almost certainly trained on our little gathering here – on this table, on me, on this bottle of Moskovskaya. Invading Jinmen and Mazu is a ploy, of course. Mao wants to force Khrushchev to cancel the trip to Washington I have been so carefully preparing.’
‘And what is our next move . . .’ Pavel began.
‘I will say nothing more,’ Kirill said. ‘Change the subject, please.’
‘Why?’ Pavel said. ‘I know Yudin well. He and I have been friends for years. Call him; ask him; give him my regards.’
There was an extended silence in the room below me, and I imagined what wordless exchanges were going on, what narrowing of eyes and fingering of glass-rims, what staring at the colourless liquid in the vodka bottle.
‘While you were in Kiev,’ Raya began, ‘nursing a phobia for elevators, I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Feodosia, where I witnessed a terrible sight: a large dog – a German Shepherd – that had been chained to a post at the side of the road, and had somehow twisted the chain around so that it cut into the flesh of its neck and started to draw blood. It was just off the town square, in broad daylight. The poor thing was writhing in pain, pulling and twisting and yelping, and making its situation worse.’
‘I thought Kirill said to change the subject,’ Pavel moaned.
‘And nobody attempted to release it, or to find the owner,’ Raya went on, ‘but instead a group of people, ordinary people – housewives, young couples, old men – simply stood and watched as it slowly bled to death. Even as it started to spasm, nobody went to find a gun or a hammer to put the poor beast out of its misery.’
‘And your point is, my dear?’ Pavel asked.
‘Perhaps the dog represents humanity,’ Kirill said, ‘and we witness its death throes, without a thought to take action to save it.’
‘And what did you do, my dear?’ Pavel asked. ‘As an intelligent observer, as an intellectual, a zhi-shi-fen-zi. Did you, my one true love, did you release the dog from its suffering?’
Raya did not seem insulted by the question, and answered simply, ‘I did nothing. I too did nothing.’ The two men were silent. After a while Raya continued, ‘I did nothing because I had been watching my nephews and nieces play in the river that day, and asking myself if they will ever be my age; if they will ever see their twentieth birthday, living as they do on a military base, their school-house no doubt in the cross-hairs of some missile waiting in a dark wood somewhere in Germany or Turkey.’
‘I think I might have intervened, nevertheless,’ Pavel said. ‘I have no faith in our ability to build weapons and deny ourselves their use. But I would have found a rock and staved in the dog’s skull. A rock is a fine weapon.’
‘You are a good man, Pavel,’ said Kirill, starting to laugh. ‘Let me pour the next round, and let us drink to men such as Pavel, and hope that you survive the blast when it comes and that you have a large rock on hand to use on the rest of us. The last and greatest heroes of mankind, that is what such men will be, staggering from door to door, blood-stained rock in hand.’
‘Do you deserve to die, Kirill?’ Pavel said.
Kirill’s laughter subsided quickly, and he sighed. ‘I am implicated, my friend, like all diplomats,’ he said. ‘Just months ago I was in Beijing with our scientists and generals, handing over the first of the plans and specifications to their scientists and generals. My fingerprints are on the treaty. My image is in the commemorative photograph, third on the left, standing behind the Great Man himself. Soon the middle kingdom will be in the middle once again.’
‘And my wife?’ Pavel asked, dropping his voice. ‘Tell me: does she deserve to have her skull staved in too?’
‘No,’ Kirill said, his voice lightening. ‘Not at all. Like all women, she deserves to be spared any suffering.’ There was a clink of glasses, then another and – after a pause – a third. Then the three of them laughed, first Raya, then Kirill, and finally Pavel.
‘Drink up,’ Raya said. ‘Enough of this silly talk. I am going to bed, and you, Kirill, have a driver waiting outside in the cold.’
*
Madame Huang almost hugged me the following morning after I had relayed the conversation in detail. Was I sure that the word ‘treaty’ had been used? And that Kirill had clearly referred to an agreement between the Soviet Union and China? Which islands were we about to invade? And could I explain once more the story about the dying dog? In her view, it did not make any sense. The dog and its owner were both stupid. How could its death be a lesson?
As she rose to dismiss me I asked her once again when I might be able to return home to visit my father. ‘Be patient,’ she said. ‘I had word yesterday that your father is responding well to treatment. But it is too soon for you to leave us; your work is too important.’
‘You had word?’ I said. ‘A telegram? A letter? Can I see it?’
‘Just word,’ she said, sharply. ‘Trust me.’
Throughout the winter I made my nightly pilgrimage down the fire escape, and observed the silent routines of Pavel and Raya. Although Kirill remained in the city, he did not return to the apartment on the third floor. Pavel and Raya had descended into their taciturn ways, and if Madame Huang had asked me to I could have written down their conversation verbatim on one small sheet of paper. I started to the read the Shanghai Liberation Daily every day, looking for reports of treaties and exchanges between China and the Soviet Union. As the months passed I read about how Tibet had been liberated from itself, how Taiwan was handed over to the Americans as an island fortress, and how India stubbornly resisted the great sweep of socialist history over the Xinjiang-Tibet Road through the Kunlun Mountains. As the year progressed, the newspaper also covered the successful testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the launching of the Sputnik satellite, and the journey of Laika the dog into orbit on a Soviet satellite. But there was no mention of any Sino-Soviet treaty. (Although my expectations of the Chinese press were misplaced, the treaty did exist, and its substance – the provision by the Soviet Union of plans for the construction of nuclear reactors and weapons, and the construction of a nuclear testing site in Lop Nur, Xinjiang, in exchange for the supply of Chinese uranium from new mines in Hunan and Jiangxi – became known only after it had been rescinded in 1960.)
One thing did catch my eye, though. While visiting Moscow, Mao delivered a speech in which he predicted that socialism would survive a nuclear war. ‘If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died,’ Mao said, ‘the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. On the debris of a dead imperialism, the victorious socialist people would create very swiftly a civilisation a thousand times superior to the capitalist system and a truly beautiful future for themselves.’ The speech struck the Communist world dumb. The Chinese press reported it without comment, as a self-evident truth.