One morning a week after I received news of my father’s death I was woken by Madame Huang’s hand on my shoulder. ‘The Conservatory has a guest house in a fishing village on the coast,’ Madame Huang said. ‘I have arranged for you and your mother to use it for three days.’ She handed me a telegram that read: ‘Arrive Shanghai Monday.’
My mother had barely slept throughout the three-day train journey, and as she stepped down from the railway carriage she wilted onto my shoulder like a flower. ‘Welcome to Shanghai,’ I said, taking her suitcase. She smiled and said a few words in greeting, and I saw that her tiredness was not simply that of the journey. We emerged through the station doors into a greasy envelope of spring heat. Our cotton clothing plastered itself to our limbs as we waited to catch the bus to the small seaside town where the Conservatory had its guest house.
The house was one of several that were built amidst a copse of trees on the edge of a cliff. All were owned by large work units in the city – the ball bearing factory; the municipal power corporation; the Academy of Social Sciences – and were for use by senior cadres. The old couple who were employed as caretakers showed us to our room, a simple space with two cots under mosquito nets, a small chest of drawers, two chairs and a table, all painted white, and a washstand with an old porcelain water pitcher and a chipped white basin. A door led out onto the veranda from which there were views down to the fishing village below, and beyond it the sandy beach and the blue-grey mass of the sea, gently pitching and rolling at high tide. A steep staircase built into the rock gave access from the guest houses to the village and the beach.
It was the first time my mother had seen the sea. I myself had only seen the Black Sea from the window of an aeroplane. We stood side by side for several minutes on the cliff top watching its marbled surface, our capacity to think or speak muted by its immensity. I had never imagined that anything could be bigger than China; but from the viewpoint of those cliffs the sea seemed capable of welcoming China and all of her masses into its cool depths, swallowing our middle kingdom ten thousand times over.
Eventually I left my mother and went in search of some tea and something to eat. When I returned she was sitting sideways in a lounge chair on the veranda with her legs tucked under her and her torso turned towards the sea. Her eyes were closed, and she was tilting her face, first this way, then that, to catch the irregular flow of the breeze, and humming softly to herself. I put the tea and a plate of fruit on the low table by her chair, and she opened her eyes, turned to me and took my hand and wrote in my palm with her finger: ‘Xie xie’ – thank you. ‘Bu keqi,’ I wrote back – don’t mention it. Then she turned back to the sea without touching the fruit or the tea. I went inside and lay on my cot and instantly fell asleep.
When I awoke it was dark. My mother was fast asleep on the bed next to me. Someone had unfurled our mosquito nets over us. I rose and found on the table two sets of chopsticks and three bowls covered with plates. Grilled fish with a hot chilli sauce, spring onions fried with egg, some steamed rice. I divided the meal in two, ate everything that was mine – even the last half-grain of rice – and locked the door to the veranda before undressing and returning to my bed.
The next morning at dawn my mother woke me and presented me with a small canvas bag. Inside was the notebook my father had kept, with his reflections on his illness. ‘But he wanted this to be published in a medical journal,’ I said. ‘Don’t give this to me. That’s why he wrote it – as case notes for publication. Remember? Like Lu Xun.’
My mother leaned her head to one side and released a gentle harrumph along with a bitter smile. ‘At this point in the nation’s history I think to tell the masses about his symptoms would be . . . inconvenient,’ she said. ‘And I am sure his wish would be that if it couldn’t be published, it would be given to you to keep.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But you should keep it. Wait for a while and then send it to a medical journal. Why entrust it to me?’
She placed her hand firmly on my wrist, and drew my arm onto her lap. Her face suddenly lost its colour and went blank, her lower lip settling into an unnatural curl. ‘It’s all I have of him,’ she whispered, not looking at me, but beyond me to the open door and the view of the sea. ‘I gave his records away to Zhu, and the gramophone. Please understand, it’s all I have of him now.’
She blinked several times.
‘But . . . his books,’ I said softly.
She blinked again, as if she had just woken with a start from a dream, and then exhaled a long harsh sigh. ‘Come walk with me,’ she said, and pulled me to my feet.
As we walked along the beach my mother explained to me the true circumstances of my father’s death and her own imprisonment. She told the story matter-of-factly, itemising the location of my father’s bedsores, the food the neighbours brought over, the arrangement of pillows she used on the kang to help him sleep in an upright position to stop his coughing, the patient she was treating when she received the news that he was dying, and precisely which records Zhu Shaozen continued to play to him after he had lost consciousness. These details and their randomness puzzled me at first; but I realised that they were simply those things that had lodged in her memory. For once she was leaving nothing out, and I sensed that this slow accretion of minute facts was to compensate for her inability to impose any order upon what she felt, even to know what it was she felt, during those days.
She told me more about the doctor from Beijing who was assigned to treat my father during his last illness – how he had arrived one day while she was at work, bringing with him a laryngoscope and canisters of oxygen and a canvas mask to help my father’s breathing, asking Zhu, who was in attendance, to push aside the medicines my mother kept on her shelf, her mandrake root and her lunar caustic, her colloids and her extract of ipecacuanha, and stocking the shelf instead with vials of atropine and emetics and expectorants. He had introduced himself to my father when he next woke, receiving from him a confused smile. My mother had arrived home to find him attaching a jar of clear fluid to my father’s forearm. He had explained that his orders were to stay for the duration, and then he sat at the table and made meticulous notes in a large black ledger.
She was surprised, she said, but relieved. My father’s death would be sanctioned by the People’s Republic. There was now a sense of necessity about it. To die in this way was another service to the masses, the final service he could perform. She was also convinced that his arrival had something to do with my success in Bucharest, although the doctor himself could not or would not confirm that.
On the night my father’s breathing lapsed into agonal rasping, the doctor took my mother aside and told her the end could still be days away. His orders were not to leave his side, he told her, so that he could witness any last words, although he doubted there would be any more words.
That night the electricity failed, and my mother and the doctor lit candles and put them around the room, filling it slowly with the smell of pork grease and smoke. Zhu joined them, bringing firewood with which they stoked the kang. He started to play through all of my father’s Brahms collection, starting with the four symphonies in order and the festival overture. My mother took each completed record from the gramophone and returned it to its brown paper sleeve as Zhu placed the next dark circle of shellac onto the platen and wound the handle.
Around ten p.m. the doctor sent Zhu to get some more oxygen from the hospital chemist, in case their supplies did not last out the night. As soon as Zhu left, the doctor took my mother by the arm into the courtyard. ‘This could take days,’ he said. ‘Or I could give him a large dose of morphine now, and it will be a matter of hours. You know how it is. I assure you I would not record that in my notes, if you promise not to mention it to anyone.’
My mother agreed. They returned to the room where my father lay and she watched as he broke open the vial and filled the syringe. As he was about to administer it, she told me, she had to turn away. She could not witness that.
When Zhu arrived back with the oxygen my mother came to the gate to admit him. She was carrying the Brahms symphonies in their paper sleeves. ‘I have put on the first of the sonatas,’ she said, and took the first of the symphonies and brought it down heavily against the concrete side of the fish pond, breaking it. Her arm was descending with the second record when Zhu caught it. His eyes sought hers.
‘Because . . .’ she said, her eyes filling with angry tears.
‘Please, not yet,’ Zhu said, and pulled her back into the warmth.
The three of them sat by the kang through the small hours of the night, listening to the music from the gramophone – the sonatas, the trios, the quartets, the quintets, the sextets, the octets, and then the concertos – stoking the fire beneath the bed and relighting the candles when they went out. It was while the great second piano concerto was playing that the doctor put his ear to my father’s chest and announced that his breath had faded into nothingness.
‘There. See,’ my mother said to the doctor, ‘no last words.’
‘I will record that,’ the doctor smiled, and then he took a surgical needle and thread from his bag. My mother looked at him quizzically. ‘You will understand that our instructions are always to sew up the lips of the dead,’ he said. ‘Especially for Party leaders. Just for appearances, in case they lie in state somewhere.’
‘And have something they want to say?’ asked my mother. ‘Some message from beyond?’
He grinned quietly. After he had finished the stitching he made some final notes in his ledger, sighing in a workmanlike way over his calligraphy, and then bade my mother farewell with a warm hand on hers, telling her that he would cable Beijing in the morning and would come back during the day to pack up his instruments and the unused supplies.
She thanked him and after letting him out and sending Zhu on his way she wrapped her warmest coat around herself and sat in the dark courtyard by my father’s well. She would have cried, she told me, she was intending to cry, except that she heard from somewhere close by the sound of another woman softly sobbing – probably the young woman on the next street, she thought, whose husband had taken to beating her after she had given birth to a stillborn son – and the rhythmic murmur of that other woman’s distress, the way it echoed through the streets like footsteps, somehow sufficed for my mother. This too she told me matter-of-factly – that in the end she had not cried for my father. Instead, after the neighbour’s sobbing had ceased she went and lay by her husband on the heated bed and slept soundly until the dawn woke her.
*
The days we spent at the coast had a dreamlike quality. We slept late, ate voraciously and went for long, meandering walks along the beach at low tide – two tall girls, loose-limbed silhouettes, carelessly scattering our footsteps, as the saying goes. On one occasion we were pursued by two barefoot young men from the village who ran after us calling out, ‘Xiao jie, xiao jie, Little sisters, little sisters,’ and upon catching up with us were taken aback to find that we were mother and daughter. They retreated, embarrassed. On our return journey we saw them sharing a cigarette in the shade of a tree, and they waved politely to us.
We did not speak much on our walks, although on several occasions my mother seemed on the brink of saying something, only to retreat into herself wearing a frown, dissatisfied with the words that had assembled in her mind. When I pressed her for her thoughts she would whisper a formula of gratitude, for the guest house, for the food which the caretaker brought to us several times a day, and for the honour I had brought upon her and myself by my playing and my international prize.
Often as we walked my mother would stop and look out to sea, as if she had heard a voice from amongst the restive waves. I would scan the horizon, searching for a lone swimmer or an injured seabird, but to no avail. I would speak softly to my mother, but she ignored me, and after a time she would turn and continue along the beach.
It occurred to me after a while that the sea itself was calling to her, inviting her to view its change of aspect: now rucked like a velvet curtain swaying in the onshore breeze, now hard and gelid as if it were a frozen mass marked by cracks and drifts, now an expanse of brocade flecked with silver threads thrown up by shuttles of air, now quivering in hard sunlight like mercury, throwing off sparks of reflected brilliance from its curved edges. ‘Do you know that proverb, “Nu ren xin, hai di zhen”?’ she said to me suddenly, on our last day. ‘A woman’s heart is like a needle at the bottom of the ocean. I have always liked that proverb, but until now I had never seen the ocean, so I could not understand it. I have always asked myself: what would it be like, for one’s heart to be a needle, and for that needle to be buried in the depths of the ocean?’
‘Now that you have seen the ocean, does it help you understand the proverb?’
She was silent for a long while, as we continued to walk along the shore. We came to the staircase and began our ascent to the cliff top and the guest house. I thought she had forgotten my question, or decided not to respond, but at the top of the stairs she turned to me and spoke: ‘Yes, yes, it does help. How could it not?’
That night we ate together quietly in our room. Through the window I could see the silvery-white cheek of the moon turned three-quarters, and below it, on the surface of the ocean, a long silken scarf stretched before us, tightly woven and luminous in the far distance, but becoming more and more frayed the closer it came to the shore, its weft more and more interlaced with darkness. My mother had borrowed from me a sleeveless cotton top, and I remember observing the light from the moon and our two candles shaping the folds of skin on her neck and collarbones, which were tough and shiny like the buttresses of a tree. When she had finished eating she put her chopsticks down and began to speak, unprompted. ‘I am so glad that you are now a child of our nation’s history, that you can disown your parents if the need arises.’
‘Now why would I do that?’ I said. ‘I am proud of my parents, just as proud as I am of anything else – my country, my playing, anything.’
‘By all means be proud of these things,’ she said. ‘And of your father and me. What I said is that I am glad you do not need to be. You are not in my shadow or in your father’s. Even when the sun shines, a shadow can be a cold place.’ I looked away, not quite knowing what to say. I could see she was not in the mood to be contradicted, and I did not want to stop her talking. ‘You remember the proverb,’ she went on: ‘Mountains stand far apart, so as not to touch each other with their shadows.’
She began to explain to me how it was my father’s books and records that had brought about his arrest and imprisonment. It was the works of bourgeois composers and mathematicians in his possession that his accusers had pounced upon. He tried to argue with them (‘How can mathematics be bourgeois?’), but was shouted down. It was their discovery of his copy of Lao Tzu that crowned his humiliation. They forced him to walk through the streets with a gag around his mouth on which they had written, ‘The Way that can be spoken is not the true Way’.
‘But did he ever betray the Communist Party?’ I asked.
‘Not with his heart,’ she said. ‘But I believe he may have with his mind. It began when he became sick, when he started getting confused about doors. Do you remember? I think at that time he began to doubt the reality of everything. He began to read Lao Tzu a great deal, although we never discussed it. So of course he must have asked himself whether the Party was right in everything it does and says.’
‘But only to doubt,’ I said. ‘Does to doubt also mean to betray?’
‘Yes it does,’ she said, growing stern all of a sudden. ‘In China, at this time, to doubt means to betray. If you do not understand that now then I am sure one day you will. Life will teach you that one day.’ I opened my mouth to speak again, but she put a finger to my lips. ‘There is something I have for you,’ she said. ‘It has been in my suitcase.’ She walked to her cot, lifted her case onto the mattress and snapped open the locks. She took out a large box and set it in front of me on the table. I did not need to open the box, but I did. Inside, wrapped in its slip of blue silk, was the red wooden body of the violin that Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume had pieced together in his Paris workshop in 1860. I lifted it from the case and noticed again the bulges in the velvet lining. ‘The letters are there too,’ my mother said. ‘They told me about the letters. It would have been unwise for them to take them back to the Soviet Union. I urged Piroshka to burn them, but she refused. The letters go wherever the violin goes, she said. The violin is not complete without the letters. Be careful with them.’
The next morning we took the bus back to the Shanghai Railway Station, and waited for an hour for the north-bound train. When the public address system announced its imminent departure we embraced on the platform, surrounded by swirls of steam and jostled by other passengers eager to get onto the train and claim their seats. My mother cupped my face in both her hands and examined my forehead, as if for signs of injury or illness. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said, and was gone from my life, leaving only the clammy imprint of her fingers on my cheeks.
In the letters we exchanged in the years that followed she never hinted at any of what we had talked about at the beach house, never mentioned my father, or Kasimir and Piroshka, never even implied by some omission or lacuna that they had existed. I told myself that she feared that her letters were intercepted by the authorities; but in my heart I knew that she would not have written any more if our correspondence had been secure. My mother’s essential skill, her way of dealing with the world, was to allow things that were painful or troublesome to slip into non-existence and then to make a whole out of what remained. She used it with her patients, performing amputations as acts of mercy; and she also used it to survive the humiliations of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and, years later, my own defection. I remembered that when I was a child I would sometimes watch her deep in reflection, and would sense that she was scoring a hard line around something in her mind – some memory, some incident, some emotion – before applying the gentle acid of her intellect to erase it from her thoughts. When she was finished she would come to herself and look up. I would ask her what she had been thinking, and she would say, ‘mei shi, nothing,’ and a smile of contentment would break across her face like a new day. And I knew that whatever it was that had troubled her it was now indeed . . . nothing.
*
When I got back to my room I placed the violin case on my bed and opened it. I sat on the small wooden stool and waited for something to happen, imagining perhaps that the instrument would somehow rise from its case and float around the room. After a while I picked it up and examined it carefully, as I would any new instrument I was about to play. I strummed the strings and corrected the tuning, and then put it under my chin and took the bow in my right hand, wondering to myself what I would play. But the hard surface of the instrument stung my left cheek, warm skin meeting cold lacquer, and this tiny shock awoke something in me, a fear or revulsion I could not name. I quickly put the violin back into its case, and left the room and sat in the stairwell for a minute, before making my way down the stairs.
It was mid-afternoon and the building was empty. I stopped by Raya’s apartment and before I knew it I had knocked on the door twice, hoping to find her there, hoping to invite myself in, to ask to speak to her, to confess to her what I knew about her, what we were doing to her, what she meant to us, or even, I thought, censoring myself, just to ask her some inane question about her work, just to look her in the eye and have her look back. There was no reply, and I made my way back to my room, took up the violin and began to play through my repertoire. My Bach, my Mozart, my Kreisler, my Bartók dances, my Chausson, my Saint-Saëns: an endless stream of notes, white, cold, and precise – as precise, I realised, as the ten million planes which my father had shown me in the tiny sliver of light between his thumb and forefinger, those hard, strong, uncomplicated surfaces, one thing only and not another, which had the thickness of a single thought. Then, in the middle of a piece, between two notes in an arpeggio, I stopped and put down my bow. The light outside was fading and in the distance I could hear the bells of the Custom House telling me that the east was now red, even though it was towards the west that the sky had turned pink. There was a noise in the stairwell and Ling Ling entered the room and greeted me with kisses and took my arm and insisted we go for a walk before dark. We ate at the refectory, and although I partook of her happy conversation and told her about the guest house at the sea and answered in part her questions about my mother and let her rest her head on my shoulder as we walked through the darkness back to our building, I knew where I wanted to be. So I left her in the room, telling her I had to go and see Madame Huang, stepped noisily down the first flight of stairs before retracing my steps quietly, and, levering open the window, made my way down the fire escape to my listening post, where I lay on my back waiting for Raya to return.
Almost immediately I heard voices and smelt the sweet aroma of the flowers Kirill had brought and the musky trails of his cologne. What followed was a successful evening for all of us. Kirill and Raya ate and drank, tortured themselves with suppressed laughter, and made a breathy, urgent, muscular kind of love on the couch, without musical accompaniment. (They did, however, place Kirill’s shirt over the stuffed bird, which Raya insisted was leering at her. ‘It must be a young male,’ she complained.) I averted my eyes from the ventilation grille, although all I could have seen was a tangle of feet and discarded clothing. Afterwards, lying naked on the couch, they shared a cigarette and began to speak softly. I took out a pencil stub and leant my ear into the striations of light that fell across my notebook from the grille, straining to pick up what they were saying.
‘He has gone then?’ Raya said. ‘Is the rumour true?’
‘Yudin?’ Kirill said. ‘Yes, he is gone. Where to, no one knows, except that he would be wise to avoid Moscow for a while.’
‘What was his crime?’
‘He lost the joint fleet. A terrible bungle.’
‘Can one lose an entire fleet?’
‘If it only ever existed on paper, yes. Militarily speaking, it was a fine idea. But it’s stillborn now. Mao shouted at him, called him names, accused us of trying to seize the whole of the Chinese coastline as a naval base and to consign the PLA to the interior; and instead of taking it like a man and playing him along, Yudin summoned Khrushchev from Moscow, and what happened next . . . well, it is now history, and is known within diplomatic circles as the Battle of the Dumpling Baths.’
‘Dumpling baths?’ Raya said. ‘Tell me more, or are these dumplings secret?’
‘It is no secret,’ Kirill laughed. ‘Far from it. Khrushchev himself is telling everyone he meets, every troop of Georgian dancers, every African ambassador, every delegation of American farmers. Clearly he thinks by telling the story himself he will avoid complete humiliation.’
‘Do tell, then.’
‘It is a simple story. On the second day of Khrushchev’s visit we are told that Mao will meet us at his residence, and when we arrive we find him in his swimming pool. He invites Khrushchev to join him, and even has a pair of shorts ready for the purpose. So we have Khrushchev flopping around, toes barely touching the bottom, clutching onto a life-ring that somebody has thrown him, and getting water up his nose, while Mao calmly swims around him like a seal – backstroke, breaststroke, then the crawl, then backstroke again, blowing spumes of water into the air, turning somersaults under the water, and talking the whole time through an interpreter running up and down the side of the pool after him – talking about Marx and Lenin and collectivism in agriculture and the communes. It was a great performance, like an emperor baiting a visiting barbarian.’
‘And where are you all this time, Kirill?’ Raya asked. ‘Stirring the dumplings?’
‘I am guarding the First Secretary’s clothes, until the two men end up chest to chest in the middle of the pool, arguing like a pair of rutting walruses, and Khrushchev signals to us to join him to explain the joint fleet proposal.’
‘To join him in the pool?’
‘Yes, because he did not trust Mao’s interpreter, and so Yudin and I stripped down to our underwear and waded into the water and we bobbed about like corks, with Yudin translating for Khrushchev, who was still clutching his life-ring, and Mao floating on his back with only his face and his stomach above the surface, and the rest of us treading water and trying to save the joint fleet proposal, which, you can imagine . . .’
‘. . . sank without trace,’ Raya said, and the two bellowed with laughter.
‘Indeed,’ said Kirill.
‘And what a tragedy,’ Raya said. ‘Like the Battle of Tsushima Strait all over again, only in miniature.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Kirill’s laughter collapsed into coughing. ‘Don’t say that, even though it’s true. Our joint fleet lies wrecked at the bottom of that pool. It was all Yudin and I could do to tow the First Secretary out of the range of Mao’s guns, get him back into his clothes and get out of there. And then in the car, Khrushchev turns to Yudin – water stains still on his shirt and his tie over his collar and one cuff-link missing – and he says, “How do you think that went?”’
‘And Yudin says “swimmingly”, does he?’
‘Not exactly – before Yudin could respond the shouting began, and it didn’t let up for three hours. You know how long our First Secretary can go on for.’
Raya rose from the couch and poured another round of drinks.
‘Is this bad?’ she said, as she stood over Kirill, balancing her glass on his upraised knee.
‘Yes,’ said Kirill. ‘We are told they will start shelling Jinmen and Mazu any day, to soften it up for an invasion. The US fleet will be in the Taiwan Strait within a week, perhaps sooner. We will be obliged to come out in support of the Chinese. Thank God they haven’t got a bomb ready yet, since I could never convince them that the bomb is something you have, but never use.’
‘And your visit to Washington?’
‘I believe Khrushchev’s resolve will hold. He will go to Washington regardless. Besides, things are very fragile in Beijing. The leadership is a leaning tower; it must fall soon. The starvation in the countryside is horrific. There has been no harvest, none at all, because during planting time the peasants were at their village furnaces pretending to make steel. By God, it is bad. Today I spoke to one of our engineers newly returned from Sichuan. It is ghastly, he says, worse than what he witnessed in the Ukraine during the Holodomor: piles of corpses, whole villages wiped out by cholera, mobs rioting in the cities and towns, smoke swirling everywhere from half-burnt bodies, and no rats, he said, because whenever one pokes its head out of the sewer the people trap it and eat it.’
‘Did they not fight a war to be free of that kind of thing? And didn’t we fight the same war?’ Raya said. ‘Get dressed, Kirill. I cannot talk about famine to a naked man. Here is your shirt. Put it on quickly, the phoenix bird is staring at you.’ She rose from the couch and began to retrieve her clothes.
‘And, there are responsible people in Beijing whose hand we need to strengthen,’ Kirill went on, reaching one arm into a sleeve. ‘There is Zhou Enlai, of course, and Chen Yun and Peng De Huai, and Liu Shaoqi, perhaps, and there is Deng Xiao Ping, about whom we are less certain. So I have been arguing that the nuclear treaty should be quietly revoked, or at least delayed so long and so persistently that China will realise it is a dead letter. And I believe my view has won the day.’
‘So I should conclude my research quickly and pack my bags?’ Raya said. ‘Or should I move into the basement immediately to escape the fallout?’
‘Not yet, not yet,’ Kirill said, watching her as she finished dressing.
‘When will they be told that the treaty is a dead letter?’
‘Khrushchev himself will tell them when he visits again in September,’ he said, speaking more rapidly as he pulled on his trousers, buckled his belt and searched for his socks. ‘He and Gromyko will come to Beijing for the Tenth Anniversary of the Liberation. The timing will be perfect, because they will be newly returned from Washington. They will have “peaceful coexistence” written all over their faces, and if they succeed the Americans will have agreed to withdraw their missiles from Taiwan and to support an Asian Nuclear Free Zone. There you have it.’
Raya lit a cigarette and leant back on the table edge. ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘Your plan is very nice. I see you have become an optimist all of a sudden, Kirill.’
‘Diplomats are always optimists,’ Kirill said. ‘I am not dispirited. Yudin’s failure is not a tragedy, but an opportunity. I see that very clearly. We are composers too, or conductors, perhaps, after a fashion. What is that term you use, when a piece of music draws you back to the key in which it started, makes you expect it, and long for it, even if you are only dimly aware of it?’
‘The return to the tonic.’
‘That’s it,’ said Kirill. He had finished dressing and he took Raya’s cigarette from her raised hand, took a puff from it and slotted it carefully back between her fingers. ‘That is the diplomat’s art – to lead nations into harmony, without their knowing it. They think they are pursuing their own ends, but we shape their thoughts and actions, like an invisible hand, so that it will be the most natural thing in the world for Beijing to . . .’
‘My God, Kirill,’ Raya said. She turned away from him. ‘Are you all innocents? Is this how you all think? You military planners and strategists?’
‘No, my love,’ Kirill said, turning his attention to his tie and flicking one end around the other twice to form a loose knot. ‘Most of us don’t think, you know that.’
‘Don’t mock me. You know what I have given up for you. I want to know it is all worthwhile.’
‘I too have given things up. For you.’
‘Oh yes, the wife you never told me about.’
‘What would you have wanted to know?’ he said, with a voice starting to fray. ‘It is the same story of all young marriages, isn’t it? Innocent deception on both sides.’
Raya was silent. I peered through the grille, but could only see her from behind. Her arms were half-folded and she was holding the cigarette, now burned down to a stub, next to her temple in one curled hand, dabbing at her hairline with her fingers. Kirill pulled sharply at his tie and moved to the window opposite, peering down into the dark street.
‘It was during the war,’ Kirill began, talking swiftly. ‘I was a young officer fighting in the South. She was from my home village, one of a dozen or so sisters and friends who would let the boys tease them when we were home from the front on furlough. I could hardly remember which one she was. Anyway, she started to write me letters, simple, earnest ones to keep up my morale. I had a corporal in my unit who was from the same village, and he received them from another of the girls, letters which were almost identical to mine. We imagined them, those girls, sitting around a table in their sarafans after a morning of making bullets or rolling bandages, writing these letters to order, not knowing that at the front we would scour every word and the shape of each letter looking for some whiff of sex, and not finding it.’
Wordlessly, Raya pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, resting her elbow on the table and leaning her forehead on her hand.
‘Smile if you want,’ Kirill said. ‘Laugh if you want. At the front that’s what you do. So when the war was over I went back to the village to see my parents and she was with them at the station, arm in arm with my father, with a bold game-hen kind of look, and small eyes that pointed at me like fingers.’
‘So you marry her.’
‘I marry her,’ he said. ‘Within a year there are twins, boys; then another one, a girl; and another. I join the diplomatic corps and we move to Moscow. I travel every month, but that doesn’t stop it. Two more boys, a girl who died within days of her birth, then another girl. My God it was like fucking the earth, it brought forth fruit in such abundance.’
‘Why are you telling me this? Why are you ridiculing this poor woman and her children in front of me?’
Kirill turned from the window. ‘I thought it would make you feel better.’
‘I feel fine already. I don’t need you to improve my mood.’
‘Well, I’m sorry. I thought from what you said that you needed . . .’
‘Needed what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, tell me her name then.’
‘Why? If you are not interested . . .’
‘Tell me. What is it? Zinaida? Malanya? Galina?’
‘No, it’s Nadezhda.’
‘God, no. Not that. Not “hope”.’
‘Everyone has to have a name.’
‘Lasciate ogni speranza,’ Raya said softly.
‘What’s that? What did you say?’
‘Nothing. Just a line from an opera about China, Puccini’s Turandot. A line about hope, after a fashion. Forget it. Nadezhda is a good name.’
‘It’s a name for a certain kind of goodness, I agree,’ Kirill sighed. ‘I must go now. I have work to do tonight. I must call the new ambassador in Beijing.’ He took up his jacket and swung it over his shoulders. ‘So, you are angry with me?’
‘Not angry,’ Raya said, ‘I am just wondering how far this innocence will take you.’
‘It has got me this far, and I had hoped it would take me a very long way.’
‘Well, we shall give it a try, shall we?’ She stubbed out her cigarette and drew a circle around the edge of his face with her finger, drawing from him a look of puzzlement and then a smile. ‘Take me with you when you leave Shanghai. Will you do that? And will you kiss me?’
*
Madame Huang’s jaw slackened, her eyes grew wide and for a moment I thought she was going to hug me again. ‘Very interesting,’ was all she said, and she got me to repeat what I had heard while she wrote it down. ‘Yes, very interesting,’ she said, ‘I will deal with this immediately. And you must remember to tell no one what you have heard. I cannot believe he has been so misled about rioting in the provinces. I cannot believe he would repeat those malicious counter-revolutionary rumours. What starvation? What disease? What invisible hands?’ She folded up her sheet of paper and put on her jacket. We walked together to the entrance of the building, where she squeezed my hand, hailed a bicycle rickshaw and disappeared down the street. Later that day I received a note from Madame Huang telling me that she and Director Ho were going to Beijing for ‘discussions’ and ordering me to report any further developments to Professor Yu.
A week later I read in the Shanghai Liberation Daily that Marshall Peng De Huai had stepped down as defence minister and had been replaced by Marshall Lin Biao. It emerged in the following months that at the Lushan Conference in Jiangxi Province Peng had boldly criticised the policies of the Great Leap Forward in a personal letter to Mao Zedong, predicting that they would result in mass starvation. Kirill had been right: the crops had not been planted, there was no harvest except the harvest of pig iron from backyard furnaces, some said that twenty million had died, and some said twice that many, and Peng De Huai was the first within the inner circle willing to say the unsayable. But Mao had reacted swiftly, circulating the letter to the other members of the Politburo, criticising Peng’s continuing friendship towards the Soviet Union, and isolating him so that the other moderates, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi, did not join in the criticism. Deng Xiao Ping stayed in Beijing and kept his head down.
*
Ten days later, I received a note instructing me to go immediately to Director Ho’s office. When I entered he was at his piano. He waved me into a chair and as I crossed the room I noticed that he was working on a musical score, part of his personal production quota, I assumed. A breeze blew through the open casement window, rearranging papers on his desk, but Director Ho seemed to notice only the notes he was writing. ‘There,’ he said at last, leaning back in his chair with a satisfied look. ‘An idea for a melody came to me while I was dreaming, and I have been humming it to myself since I got up this morning. Now it is captured forever on paper, like a little songbird in its cage.’ He deposited the score on the table in front of me, and poured himself a cup of tea. Then, remembering himself, he offered me tea also. ‘It will be a song for children,’ he explained. ‘I think I will call it Behind Enemy Lines. I have the words worked out too, and I will add them shortly. What do you think?’
I glanced along the lines of music. It was a simple melody, strongly reminiscent of the opening theme of the third movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Before I could offer my opinion Director Ho settled himself in the chair opposite me and began to tell me about his visit to Beijing. It had been a very important visit, he said. The Party leaders were very grateful to the Conservatory and to me in particular for tracking down the ‘bad elements’ amongst the Russians. Indeed, Director Ho had mentioned me in person to Premier Zhou Enlai during a private audience, and Zhou – who had already heard of my prize in Bucharest – had asked Director Ho to pass on his personal thanks and commendations for my work.
‘Zhou is very interested in the scientific approach to music,’ Director Ho went on. ‘We talked at great length about the value of music as a tool in diplomacy. And we both believe that it is time for music in China to stand up and demonstrate its role in the vanguard of the socialist enterprise.’ He slurped his tea loudly. ‘Premier Zhou has asked for the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra to play at a banquet in September in Beijing. It is to celebrate the visit of Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, which coincides with the Tenth Anniversary of the People’s Republic. He asked me for advice on what music should be played on that occasion, and after some thought I recommended a recently discovered work by Xian Xinghai, called The Liberation of Mudanjiang. It concerns the uprising of the people of Mudanjiang during the rule of the Manchukuo puppet regime.’
‘This is a great honour for the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra,’ I said. ‘Have you told Conductor Li about this?’
‘No,’ said Director Ho. ‘I am telling you first, because you will be the soloist. This is Xian’s lost violin concerto, and you will deliver the premiere performance. China has supreme confidence in your ability.’
‘China does?’
‘We do too.’
I tried without success to recall any mention of a lost violin concerto by Xian Xinghai. Meanwhile Ho went to his desk, and took a shallow cardboard file box from one of its drawers. ‘Here is the score,’ he said. ‘You must learn it quickly and well.’ He put the box in front of me. The characters of Xian Xinghai’s name were stencilled on the top. ‘What is more,’ he said, dropping his voice and placing his hand on the box reverently, ‘I must ask you not to show this to Comrade Meretrenko, or to tell him or anyone else about the performance in Beijing. This matter is highly confidential. I myself will talk to Conductor Li about finding an accompanist who can help you prepare. In the meantime, assume that only you and I and Madame Huang know about the performance, and even about the existence of this score.’
‘Perhaps Tian Mei Yun could help me prepare,’ I suggested.
‘Perhaps,’ Ho said, raising an eyebrow; and then he began to shake his head. ‘Perhaps not.’
‘When did Xian Xinghai compose the concerto?’ I asked. ‘I have never heard it mentioned.’
‘In 1945, while he was in Moscow,’ He explained, ‘It was the last work he wrote before his death. It has recently come into my possession.’
I opened the box. The pages of the score were loose. Inscribed in neat hand-written characters at the top of the first page were the words: The people suffer under the boot of foreign oppressors, but secretly plan their revenge. Director Ho explained that the concerto was a programmatic work in four movements. The first was slow and brooding, as befitted its title. The second movement – faster and more difficult – was entitled: The Party, the vanguard of the people, defeats the hapless occupiers and assembles their captives in the town square. The mood becomes sombre in the third movement, he said: The masses gather to try the crimes of their oppressors, offering them the opportunity to confess at the point of a gun, and receive lenient treatment. He turned the pages to the final movement, which had the longest title of all: The people celebrate their victory, dancing on the bones of those who refuse to confess their crimes and acknowledge the rightness of Mao Zedong thought and the historical inevitability of socialist victory.
‘I must leave you here for a while,’ Director Ho said, ‘I have some visitors to attend to. Please study the score here in my office. For the time being I cannot allow you to take it away. Once we have an accompanist I will give you exclusive use of one of the practice rooms. In due course you will have rehearsals with the orchestra too.’
I began to read the score to myself, taking it in one bar at a time, trying to meld together the violin solo with the multiple lines of accompanying music for the various parts of the orchestra. I found this impossible. I was used to reading scores for violin and piano, and perhaps a cello as well; but I lacked the capacity to hold five or six separate parts in my head at the same time, let alone the different timbres of strings, brass, woodwind and percussion. Eventually, I simply read through the violin part.
It was not at all like Xian Xinghai’s other works. It was a melancholy work in a minor key, and I could not recall him ever composing something so emotionally charged. Of course, by 1945 he had been stranded in the Soviet Union for five years by the war, longing to return to his homeland and his family; he would also have been contemplating his own death in the dank Moscow hospital where he was receiving treatment, so it was easy for me to imagine the inspiration for the first movement – long, sleepless nights spent reflecting upon his own mortality, listening to footsteps echo down strange hallways, and, apart from the music in his head, hearing only the murmurings of nurses and doctors in a language he had not learned. If this was right, however, it seemed strange that he would choose to compose a programmatic work concerning Mudanjiang, a dusty city in my home province, and a liberation which had not to my knowledge acquired any degree of fame in recent Chinese military history.
By the time I came to the end of the second movement, I was certain that this work was not by Xian Xinghai, or any other Chinese composer. There were no echoes at all of traditional Chinese music, and none of the familiar homage to Beethoven and Mozart. I turned over the last page of the second movement and studied the opening bars of the third: The masses gather to try the crimes of their oppressors, offering them the opportunity to confess at the point of a gun, and receive lenient treatment. The booming kettle drum led off, with the bass strings and the brass section playing fortissimo, and I began to laugh out loud, not in the least surprised to find that I was reading the passacaglia from Shostakovich’s violin concerto, whose premiere performance I had given in the parlour of a small house in Harbin nine years earlier. I suspect a part of my mind had already picked up the repeated pattern of notes throughout the first two movements, the D – E-flat – C – B sequence that spelt out the composer’s name. I immediately looked down the margin of the page and, finding the word cor ingles at the end of a stave, ran my finger along the line that Shostakovich wrote for Piroshka’s oboe.
Director Ho returned, bringing with him Madame Huang. I rose to my feet and poured both of them a cup of tea from the urn, being careful to hand them their cups using both hands – first, Director Ho, then, Madame Huang. My politeness put them on edge.
‘I am honoured that Premier Zhou believes that I am the right person to play at the banquet in September,’ I began. ‘But my talent is as yet undeveloped. I feel I should refuse this assignment, and continue my studies for another five years. Perhaps then I will be ready to be a soloist for such an occasion.’
I could tell that my show of customary self-deprecation carried no weight. Director Ho sighed irritably and picked up his tea cup delicately between his thumb and index finger. ‘It is out of the question,’ he said. ‘The matter is decided. You should not doubt yourself when China has no such doubts itself.’
‘So what is it you really want to say?’ Madame Huang eyed me.
‘There is a question I want to ask,’ I said. ‘Is there a reason why you are attempting to pass off a work by Dmitri Shostakovich as if it were by Xian Xinghai? It may help me in my preparation if I know why. That’s all.’
Director Ho’s tea cup – which was describing an ascending arc towards his mouth – halted and performed two unsteady loops before continuing its journey. There was silence for a moment, and then both of them spoke at once: ‘You must . . .’ started Madame Huang; ‘You see . . .’ started Director Ho. And both fell silent again.
‘I must . . . see,’ I repeated. ‘What must I see?’
‘You must see,’ said Madame Huang, glancing at Director Ho, ‘that both truth and falsehood can serve the interests of socialism.’
‘Well said,’ Director Ho smiled and wagged his finger at me in excitement. ‘And indeed, one might say that there is no falsehood intended. It is important that our guests recognise the true origins of the music as well; if not during the performance, then at least afterwards. You see, we trust their intelligence as much as we can obviously trust yours. Premier Zhou does not want them to be deceived, nor even to think that we are trying to deceive them. After all, what is the point, if they do not recognise that it is Soviet music we are playing for them, with Chinese characteristics added?’
‘But this is a composer who is out of favour in the Soviet Union,’ I said. ‘His music has been criticised as reactionary and chaotic. It will be an insult to play it.’
‘And in recognition of that we have renamed it as The Liberation of Mudanjiang, and attributed it to a Chinese composer, and given programmatic titles to each movement,’ said Director Ho.
It must have registered on my face that the logic of this statement had escaped me. Madame Huang leaned towards me and said, ‘Director Ho has discussed this matter with Premier Zhou, and’ – she glanced towards Ho, who met her eyes and nodded to her – ‘also with Chairman Mao Zedong. These are the instructions we have received, and indeed Mao himself helped to compose the titles for each movement.’
‘And enjoyed himself immensely doing it,’ Director Ho smiled.
‘We need to trust the judgement of Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou,’ Madame Huang said.
‘I have arranged for you to have exclusive use of practice room number four,’ Director Ho said, ‘but you will need to come to my office first to collect the score and the key to the practice room, and you must return both to me once you have finished practicing for the day. You are excused from all other classes, including your lessons with Comrade Meretrenko.’
‘And as for your other duties,’ said Madame Huang, ‘we have found another young woman who understands Russian. She will move into your room today and will take over your responsibilities. Her name is Fan Hong. You will move immediately to new lodgings close to the Conservatory. You see? We have thought of everything.’