Memories of my childhood began to gather around me on the day before my fifty-fifth birthday, during the long drive home from the beach house at Castlepoint. They were tiny shards, enigmatic and unconnected – the clicking of my car indicator transformed into a song from my schooldays, a whiff of farm air bringing back to me the smell of newly pressed bean curd, tagging scrawled on a fence spelling out parts of my name in Cyrillic script on a concert poster, and the flanks of a certain hill becoming the gently curved gutter crown of the felt Homburg that Kasimir always wore. I had experienced this several times during the decades since I left China (in moments not claimed by my brood of children, or my husband’s manic schemes), and I had learned simply to endure the hours during which the past rained upon my head like a meteor shower, fragments of my parents’ lives, of my childhood, my youth, and my distant, abandoned career as a socialist musician and spy, the wandering jigsaw puzzle of something that was once a world, propelled through space by the inertia of its history.
In the course of my ascent of the Rimutaka Hill the muffler hose on my Toyota Crown came adrift, and as I turned off the motorway and climbed the final hill to Brooklyn my solid metal chariot was growling like a fat man gargling. The owner of the antique shop on the corner of my street looked up at me and waved as she brought in the wares she had arranged in front of her door. The lights changed to green, and the fat man roared as I leaned my weight against the steering wheel and gunned the engine long enough to pass the final rise, from where I could nurse the barge-like bulk of the vehicle around the last few corners with jerks and tugs on the tiller.
I arrived home, more weighed down by the silt of memory than by my small tightly packed suitcase, and began to climb the zig-zag path to my house on the Brooklyn ridge. During my month-long absence the wooden gate, whose white-painted slats had long ago become enmeshed in the adjacent hedge, had pulled away from the upright and now lay at an oblique angle, ancient screws dangling from rusted holes like little blackened larvae, revealing a pair of empty beer bottles, denuded of their labels, nestled amongst the twigs and leaf-litter beneath the hedge. The day was almost done and the path was dark and bosky, overhung by rhododendrons that had become ingrown and woody during years of self-rule. I emerged from their purple gloom into the evening light and stood between the two Canary Island palms that guard the entrance to my house, feeling protected by their squat symmetry, their tub-like trunks and explosion of sharp fronds. I turned to look out over the city that had been my home for a quarter of a century. It was the kind of evening that would have prompted my late husband to stand at our front door with his arms opened to the darkening sky and the spangle of city lights below it and pronounce theatrically, ‘Has earth anything to show more fair?’ He would repeat the question several times, changing where the stress fell, until satisfied he had subdued any contradictory voices that may have been lurking in the shrubbery.
I found myself admiring again the rounded belly of the inner harbour, the seemingly vertical stacks of houses on the western face of Mount Victoria, the sharp green edge of the ridgeline and then beyond it the layers of the distant mountains, their boundaries bleeding into one another like turquoise water stains, before merging eventually with the smooth lapis-coloured sky. I felt a surge of affection for the place in which the fragments of my life had settled and taken shape, like a nest of twigs deposited amongst rocks at the highest point of a now forgotten flood.
It had been a hot day, the hottest of the summer so far, and the evening air now pressed itself upon the city like a blanket of warm velvet, through which currents of cool air threaded like ribbons of liquid silk. Down the street a cluster of people sat around an open front door talking. I could hear the clink of a wine bottle, a man and a woman laughing, in turn and then in unison, basso profundo and mezzo soprano. A gust of wind arose from nowhere, like a sigh from the earth. It brushed the hillside, setting the treetops rustling like bridesmaids swirling their taffetas. The palm fronds above me clacked, bird-like, in response.
For a moment, in the sun’s angled light, the scene became curiously still, as if fixed by some photographic chemistry. Then in the midst of this tableau a plane leapt heavenward from behind Mount Victoria, its fuselage seeming, from this distance, incongruously long, as if it were a stage prop, of necessity disproportionate in size to its surrounding scenery, being drawn steadily upwards by some hidden pulley and ropes. The plane turned over the city and roared off towards the west, and when I turned my gaze back to the harbour the light was there, the light of the sun concentrated on a shiny surface, a windowpane perhaps, amidst the foliage on the upper slopes of Mount Victoria. It flared like burning magnesium, nine million miles of light gathered into a point and reflecting a pencil of brightness, like a patriot’s signal, across the vault of empty air above the city. I stood, my face and torso illuminated by this warm, yellow radiance, and my sense of distance, of perspective, was suspended momentarily. I saw the whole scene afresh as my father might have during one of his attacks: flat like a painted screen hanging from the sky just inches in front of my face, with the point of reflected light marking a tiny tear in the world’s tapestry, a passage into a space beyond, from which someone was shining a searchlight.
The moment passed, but I was now thinking of my father’s illness once more, and recalling our encounter with the front door, and the wetness of his blood on my hands after I had pulled him through, and the gloom that descended upon him in the weeks that followed. This is what memory can do, indeed it is what we most fervently want it to do: to flatten the perspective of time, bring distant mountains to our doorstep, so that every tiny detail of the past can become present to us once more, engraved as it were on a granite surface before our eyes, so that we can marvel at it, marvel that we were part of it, press our palms to its cool hardness, lean our weight against its mass, run our fingertips along its grooves, or, if we wish, rub its lines as a keepsake onto a sheet of thin paper.
I sat down on the bulging skirt of root-mat that ringed one of the Canary Island palms and leaned back against its trunk, feeling rather like a sage reclining under a sacred tree in some high mountain grove. The next day, I realised, it would be thirty-eight years since my father died. He died on my seventeenth birthday.
The light was fading as I turned back to the house. I stepped onto the veranda and into the patterned glow cast from within through the coloured glass panels of the door. Fumbling with the keys, I finally managed to open the door, to be greeted by a tall, slightly stooped woman who moved forward, one knuckle pressed wetly into her eye socket, to place some keys on the table below the large mirror. I am presented with this changing portrait of myself whenever I return home, slightly older, dressed in the emotions of the hour, captured for a moment in a heavy gilt frame. To place a mirror facing the front door of your house is good feng shui, they say, as it prevents the entry of bad spirits, who, unwilling to look at their own reflections, mill around the threshold disconsolately and eventually move on to the next house in search of shelter. I am always expecting to catch a glimpse of the grim face of some banished soul in the doorway behind my shoulder, but the only face I ever see is my own.
I turned towards the bathroom, and on the middle panel of the door found a rural scene painted in voluptuous oils: a country church, a field of lavender in curving rows, a peasant in clogs and yellow straw hat driving a cow towards a copse of trees where other beasts lay dozing in deep shadow. It was a pastiche of something Leon and I had seen in Paris, when we lived anonymously in a quiet corner of Saint-Denis and took the metro into the city on quiet afternoons when admission to some galleries was half price. On the door above the picture, in blue and yellow, were the words Aix en Bains.
Inside the bathroom I was surprised to find an intricate jungle gym of handrails around the shower and the toilet, in stainless steel etched with non-slip cross-hatching. How did this stuff get here? Then I remembered the workmen who had arrived, barely a week before the end, to install it. ‘Tarzan of the Dunny’, Leon had called himself. At least they had not touched Leon’s decorations. The word Aix was still painted in a deep jungle green on the door of the medicine cabinet above the sink, and Bains in large orange letters on the wall above the bath.
Returning to the entrance I found a wad of letters on the table beneath the mirror, held together by a rubber band. I picked them up and began to thumb through them as I stepped towards the living room. And stopped. I rested my hand on the door frame and pulled myself through.
The photograph of Leon hung on the wall opposite, where my daughter had said she would put it before she returned to London. It was the one he liked best. A studio shot, head and shoulders, in monochrome to give it a timeless show-biz aristocracy look, chin resting upon his knuckles, an air of bemused self-confidence that everyone knows to be very far from the truth. He said his face reminded him of a large crumbling cheese; but as I approached it now, and as the light in the room began to dim, what I saw in it was a cliff by the seashore – loose, clay-like skin (in the original, tinged pinky red), fissures running diagonally across his forehead, nests of mossy hair perched on crags and ledges around the ears and neck, and fleshy buttresses beneath his chin separating gorges choked with a scree of distressed skin and tufts of looping grey hairs. On top of his head the hair retreated unevenly sideways and back into a wiry thicket, slanting upwards and to the right, like a juniper thrown about by windy blasts.
‘Simultaneously the eminence grise and the enfant terrible of the theatre world,’ the newspaper had said. Stepping nimbly from lighting director at the Opera in Paris to set designer at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and then returning home ‘with his Chinese wife and growing family’ to establish himself as a director, producer and eventually godfather to a theatrical generation, he was for the most part loved, but not without his rivals and detractors. Known for his generosity, especially to puckish young talent (from whom he selected Sascha, living with her for three years before returning to his wife as his health failed), but also for his temper, his irrationalities and his obsessions.
Yes, I thought when I read the piece: his irrationalities, his friable edges, and his inner core of hardness. The article concluded with the simple phrase, ‘after a short illness’.
I passed by the photograph and went to the kitchen, where I made myself a pot of Yellow Mountain Famous Tea and set it on the coffee table, along with one ceramic cup. I sat down facing the window and the view of the darkening harbour. I turned on the lamp by the couch and its stained-glass shade coloured the ceiling above me with a soft patchwork quilt of reds and blues. Streams of vapour rose like a dancer’s hands from the teapot.
Memory is a weight, but also an anchor. I recalled the puckish actresses, and also (discreetly omitted in the paper) the puckish actor, Perry, upon whom, for a period of several years, Leon bestowed roles he did not deserve and did not carry off. But these were also the years of our happiness – the children, the holidays camping by southern lakes, the opening night parties on our lawn, fuelled by ‘cuvées’ Leon created by pouring the contents of several half-full bottles into one, and by late night jazz standards played on the piano, with Leon producing our daughter’s violin and scraping out a rendition of ‘Oh, Shenandoah’, to which our guests would all sing ‘away, you rolling river’, after which we would make our bed on cushions pulled from the couch, with a child or two beside us, and other sleeping forms around us like a colony of seals wrapped up in newspapers and blankets and coats, my back nuzzled into Leon’s warmth, his arm over my side, lazily caressing my nipple between thumb and forefinger or, with his palm, cupping the new child within me.
A friend of Leon’s in Paris, a curator’s bagboy, had explained to me that sometimes a sculptor chips away incessantly at a piece of work until it slips beyond art and becomes unfinishable, and useless for anything except to instruct students. Such, I thought many times, was my husband.
He is everywhere; unfinished, and unfinishable.
*
I took up the pile of letters in order to break the spell of my reverie. The first was from my eldest daughter Miro, my dark jewel, now back in England with her fiancé and their children.
Are you all right now? she began. Silly question, I know; as if you could be all right, this soon after, but you know what I mean. Here are the photographs of Bella I promised you. Isn’t she fine? Rosa and Antonio are being very helpful with the children, and, as promised, we are keeping them on a short leash – only one rave per weekend! They are turning heads over here, you know – twins, hybrid vigour, androgynous good looks, and so on. I promise I will bundle them onto a plane soon and you will have them back before their term starts.
I studied the photographs she had enclosed, lingering on the composition of my new granddaughter’s face – a mat of dark hair, whispers of eyebrow, a tiny fluted nose, and wine-dark lips – and recognised, with a sudden moistening of my eyes, the outline of my own face from photographs more than fifty years old, photographs that I kept pressed between sheets of translucent paper in an album in my desk.
And now to the meat of this letter (although Miro is a vegetarian her letters always contain meat) . . . and she went on to explain the situation, aided by a clipping from a London newspaper. A dispute between Sotheby’s and the Chinese government, no less, over a rare violin which the Chinese claimed had been stolen from their embassy in Paris in 1965, and which had resurfaced in the estate of a yachtsman in the Channel Islands. There was even some talk of the new Russian government claiming it, citing records that had it in the possession of the Romanovs. She had taken the liberty of registering my interest in it, she wrote. She knew I would not mind.
Colin thinks we should press our case. He’s away from dawn until about 8pm most days, and he’s travelling a lot, mostly to The Hague, so he thinks it will help me to have something to work on once the twins are back with you. He hates the thought of me vegetating around the flat with two children, doing coffee mornings and playgroups – he says that’s the slippery slope towards macramé(!) and other such horrors. He says he’ll help with the law if he can, but that I can handle the research side of things and the media. He even suggested you should fly over and be here in person! How things change!
Colin had put her in contact with one of the junior partners in his firm. And she had talked to a journalist friend, who thought it would make a great story, and was eager to interview me as soon as I returned from the beach house, in particular to ask me about the precise circumstances of the theft of the violin, and whether I had any insight into how it found its way to the Channel Islands. Sotheby’s were being tight-lipped – the public interest might increase the price at auction, but they wanted to avoid a protracted legal battle over provenance.
I recalled a previous conversation with Miro about my failure to capitalise on my history. ‘The whole field is opening up,’ she had said. ‘There are wild swans everywhere, calling out to each other from the mist, getting rich, being glorious.’ Enmeshed in my satisfying, ordinary life, I had demurred.
‘Who now remembers Khrushchev’s visit to Beijing in 1959?’ I replied. ‘Or the performance he attended at the Great Hall of the People? Or the music played on that occasion? Or who played it? I don’t even merit a footnote. Nowadays we think Chinese history started with the Cultural Revolution. Nothing that went before holds any interest. Has anyone even heard of the Sino-Soviet rift? No, and those that have probably think it’s an earthquake fault or a mountain range in Siberia. And yet it was so important at the time: Russia and China screaming at each other, throwing plates, and half the world caught up in the dispute, the fist-shaking and table-thumping, and the troop trains heading north to the borders, and the bombers on standby. But now even that’s just a footnote. No one remembers, and if they did, would they care? All they want to hear about is struggle sessions and Red Guards waving little red books – city kids, amateurs, thugs – not serious revolutionaries like my parents.’
‘You care, don’t you?’ Miro had said.
‘It’s my duty to care, just as back then it was my duty to perform for communism’s mother and father the last time they held hands and pretended everything was still all right. But that doesn’t mean I have to write a book about it.’
‘It must mean something more than just duty,’ she said. ‘What if they’d patched up their differences? Would that have made a difference to you?’
‘I guess the moderates in China would have been strengthened and they might have acknowledged the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and twenty million Chinese might have been saved by shipments of Soviet wheat.’
‘That’s worth caring about, isn’t it?’
‘Not entirely. With the Russians as friends, Mao and Lin Biao might have got the bomb sooner than they did. They might have had it during the Cultural Revolution, and I shudder to think what that would have meant.’
‘There’s the story then: “How my violin and I stopped Mao getting the Bomb”.’
‘On the other hand, perhaps my performance hastened the downfall of the moderates, of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao Ping, leaving them out in the cold for the next twenty years. But on the other hand . . .’
‘That’s your third hand,’ Miro had warned.
‘On my third hand . . . perhaps my performance strengthened Zhou Enlai and helped him to survive the Cultural Revolution.’
‘Which meant . . .’
‘. . . that Madame Mao and the Gang of Four couldn’t get the support they wanted from the military, so that, when Mao died in 1976 . . .’ I stopped mid-sentence, my train of thought lost.
‘Is there a fourth hand?’
‘Yes, and a fifth too, and a sixth. You can read it all in MacFarquhar’s three-volume history, there on the shelf behind you. I could have a thousand hands, like that statue of Guan Yin at Chongqing.’
‘I think you’ve made your point,’ Miro said. ‘It’s like what they say – the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon can alter the course of a hurricane thousands of miles away. But if you were to trudge through the jungle, braving the rapids and the crocodiles, and find that particular butterfly in its particular tree, there’s still the question of what to do with it. Do you crush it? Catch it? Chase it off in a different direction? Pin it to a wall?’
‘China has never had any doubts about what to do with butterflies,’ I said.
*
I steeled myself for her telephone call. (She is a meticulous keeper of promises.) We would no doubt replay the argument, and I wondered if I would lose my patience and produce the final ace from my pack, my final reason for keeping the silence: I don’t want to tell the story because we had to kill a man to escape. Listen to me, Miranda, your father and I had to kill a man. That was what I had to do to slip through the Great Chinese Wall, through which death is the only door – if not one’s own death, then the deaths of others. And if the latter, don’t they deserve now to rest?
At eight o’clock precisely the telephone rang. I remained in my chair, letting it echo through the house.
*
I spent the early 1960s in Paris at the Conservatoire, living in two rooms in a building inhabited by Chinese diplomats and their families. For the first year I was under instruction to enter any competition I could find, and I duly brought honour to China by amassing awards and trophies which were handed over to my superiors and which, as far as I am aware, still lie, boxed and labelled, in some archive in Beijing. Only with difficulty did I convince the ambassador that my participation in small competitions in modest industrial towns in Belgium and Czechoslovakia and Northern Italy was doing no favours for China’s reputation abroad. Besides, my schedule was starting to fill up with invitations to play with more prestigious orchestras and conductors, and to perform alongside the inevitable touring ensembles of Chinese musicians and dancers, the advance guard of cultural diplomacy. On all of my travels I had an embassy minder; sometimes Ruan, if his linguistic skills (which I began to realise were somewhat third rate) were not required on other duties, and at other times the bored wives of first and second secretaries.
In Sofia on one of these occasions I found myself on the same bill as Maxim Shostakovich. We had time to exchange a few sentences, and I asked Maxim once again if he knew anything about his father’s old friends, Kasimir and Piroshka. He told me that they had been detained in Moscow for a month. He believed his father may have had something to do with their eventual release, but could not say for sure. (They returned eventually to Leningrad, I learned years later, and lived with Vitja until his death in 1970, following him within a matter of months.) Ruan was by this time breathing down my neck, tapping my ankle with his toe to try to get me to break off the conversation, but I stood my ground. Maxim said that his father had heard news of the performance of his concerto at the Tenth Anniversary Celebrations, and that he had been ‘distressed’. But the word Maxim used was carefully chosen, signifying an affected distress, a kind of theatrical swoon. I repeated his phrase back to him, and he smiled and said to me, ‘Well, to be frank, he was highly amused. The first he heard about it was when he was in Dresden composing a string quartet. He was shown a statement that had been prepared for his signature, denouncing China’s corruption of his violin concerto. He jokes that he can perform his signature upside down, so that they do not need to turn around the papers they bring to him to sign. This letter has not been used, however, as no word of your concert has reached the foreign media. But he was very amused.’
‘I am glad to provide him with something to laugh about,’ I had said, somewhat annoyed.
‘You did just that,’ Maxim said. ‘It came at a time when he needed very much to laugh. He said the quartet he was composing would ‘bring his life to an end’, and we were beginning to worry about him; but after he heard of your interpretation of his concerto his mood became lighter. Nothing delights him more than a good musical joke, Ein musikalischer Spass.’
*
On my return to Paris I began rehearsals for a live recording at the Palais Garnier. (The dog-eared LP, whose liner notes refer to my ‘recent tragic death’, has pride of place in my collection.) During a pause in the proceedings I heard a voice calling to me in Russian from above my head, and looked up to find a young man dangling from a rope amidst the lights. It was Leon. He belayed down to the stage and shook my hand solemnly, and then began to laugh, as if he had spotted something amusing about me that had escaped my notice, some faux pas in my choice of clothes or some stray grains of rice lodged in my hair.
‘I’m the deus ex machina around here,’ he said, leaning on his rope, and when I angled a curious glance at him he explained: ‘The ghost in the machine.’ Then he took up Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume from the open case beside me, placed it under his chin and started to play a jig, tapping his foot and eyeing me mischievously, daring me to stop him. Heads turned towards us from amongst the orchestra, and the conductor, who was off stage conversing with the sound engineer, glowered at me. I noticed Ruan, who had been watching from his seat in the third row, immediately spring to his feet and make his way up the aisle towards us, but before he reached the stage Leon had lowered the violin like a sleeping child into its velvet snug, called to someone in the gloom above us, hooked his foot into a loop at the end of his rope and begun his ascension into the chaos of cables and lamps and brackets behind the proscenium arch.
After the rehearsal Ruan and I walked down to the Seine once more, and checked out the bouquinistes. He seemed uninterested in talking, even the obligatory questions about the rehearsal to provide him with material to report to his superiors, should they care to ask. He selected a book, in fact a set of three small volumes with a photograph of a dark, moustachioed man on the cover, and we retired to the nearest café. We drank our coffee and Ruan absorbed himself in the first of his volumes while I, for lack of anything better to do, took out my score and began to review the notes I had scribbled in its margins.
A shadow fell over our table, and I heard a familiar laugh and looked up to see Leon silhouetted against the afternoon sun. Behind his shoulder, clouds scurried like rats across the pale blue sky. Once more he had detected something indefinably amusing about us. ‘Well, well, well, who do we have here?’ he said, first to Ruan, in French, and then to me, in Russian. We said nothing, but without asking Leon sat down, examined one of Ruan’s books and, laughing once more, explained, again first in French and then in Russian, that he had started to read it some years ago, that it was very good, but that he had not got beyond the first fifty pages. ‘Nothing happens,’ he said. ‘And then his mother kisses him goodnight. And then nothing happens again. And again.’
The waiter approached and Leon ordered another round of coffees and started to tell us about his job at the Opera, and about my old teacher, who had settled once again into a despondent hibernation in a distant arrondissement. Every sentence was laboriously rendered in both languages. I told him that my comprehension of the French language had improved, even if my attempts to speak it were halting. However, he insisted upon this exhausting process, and I soon understood why, for the two strands of conversation began to part company, although Leon was careful to maintain the same tone of voice. And eventually, after telling Ruan something about French politics he turned to me, gave me a précis in Russian, and added, without skipping a beat, ‘Come with me to Montmartre tomorrow, and I will paint your portrait.’
‘You know I can’t do that,’ I replied. ‘What you are asking me to do is not permitted.’
He ‘interpreted’ my response for Ruan, using the word ‘socialisme’ twice, and then turned to me again. ‘Surely you know you can trust me,’ he said. ‘Have you suffered at all from our last outing? Does your friend here even know about it? We already have one little secret – why not one more?’
At that moment our coffees arrived, along with three more pastries. Leon handed the waiter a banknote folded lengthwise into a V-shape, and, after a mutual round of eye contact – not unlike those I would share with Tian and Ling Ling the moment before we began to play the first note of a trio – we applied ourselves to drinking and eating. We barely spoke until we had finished and Leon had produced a book of matches and a packet of Gauloises. He tapped out three, handed them around, and lit them.
Leon turned to me, held his cigarette side-on and pointed to it as if he were about to explain its origin. ‘Remember I am a Communist too. I am named after Trotsky.’ He then turned to Ruan, once again holding up his cigarette for examination, and said something in French.
While Leon was talking, a pair of sparrows landed on the adjacent table. One flew off immediately, but the other hopped across to our table and stood next to Ruan’s cup. My eyes sought out Ruan’s. He returned a gentle nod and his jaw settled to one side into a half smile as he lowered his cigarette to the ashtray and cupped his hands over his knee again, inches away from the bird. The sparrow took one crumb, then another, performing little jumps and jerkily rotating its head. I could see Ruan was watching it intently, although he continued to mutter polite acknowledgements to Leon. His breathing appeared to have slowed, as if he was clearing his mind. I waited for him to make his move.
Leon turned back to me, taking a drag on his cigarette. ‘What is more, my father fought with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War,’ he said. ‘Under Colonel Belov at Albacete. You see? I have a pedigree you can trust.’
Ruan had still not moved. The sparrow jumped from side to side, eyeing the last crumb.
‘What is the Spanish Civil War?’ I said. ‘And who is Trotsky?’
Ruan looked up at me and I saw his eyes widen a fraction. He turned back to the sparrow and then raised one hand and waved it away. In a feathery flash it was gone.
‘If you wish, we can invite your friend here, as well,’ Leon said, turning back to me. ‘I see he is reading Proust. I can take you to see Proust’s apartment, or if you wish to the restaurants he frequented in the Bois de Boulogne. He may enjoy that better.’
I placed my hand on Leon’s and held up my palm to signal him to stop talking. I turned to Ruan and said, in Chinese, ‘He wants to take us to a place called Montmartre, to a café he says is much better than this one, with live jazz music and exotic French delicacies we will not have tasted.’
Ruan raised his eyebrow.
‘And he would like to paint your portrait, or perhaps he means he knows an artist there who will paint your portrait, as a memento of your time in Paris. I am not entirely sure which he means.’
Ruan looked at Leon, who smiled uncomprehendingly.
‘He will tell nobody about this, and besides what harm could there be? He may even reveal something of use to you, if indeed he is spying on us, as you once believed. We could get him drunk and see what comes out. What do you think?’
*
The sky was darkening when we stepped from the metro into the heart of Montmartre. Leon grabbed my hand and I in turn took Ruan’s and together we rushed through the narrow streets, weaving like a needle and thread between the lovers and the bohemians and the American tourists. As we arrived at the steps of the Basilica the sun, or at least its yellowish thumbprint, was smearing itself against the western skyline. ‘Just in time,’ Leon announced, as he drew us all into a line along the lip of the plaza, as if our next act would be to raise our clasped hands in triumph and to make a deep bow to acknowledge the silent applause from the retreating light. Instead Ruan and I released our hands and, as if to reestablish our separate identities, wandered apart a half a dozen steps and caught our breath.
‘Let’s go inside the Basilica,’ Leon said, in my ear. ‘Quick, before they close the doors.’ He took my hand again and pulled me towards entrance of the sanctuary. I waited until we were halfway up the steps and then turned and called to Ruan to follow. He hurried after us, breaking into a light canter, as fast as he could go without breaching diplomatic decorum. This left me enough time to whisper to Leon that he should mollify Ruan with a few tidbits that would pass as state intelligence.
‘Something about De Gaulle or Kim Philby,’ I said. ‘But nothing obviously fabricated.’ Leon gave out a short grunt, which at first I thought indicated understanding and assent, until I noticed that a grey-haired woman of stern regard was firmly shutting the door to the Basilica, aided by a lanky youth in a button-up jacket with a long chain of keys drooping from his belt like a tinkling shirt-tail.
‘Merde,’ Leon muttered. And then louder, ‘Damn! Govno! Scheisse!’ The woman wagged a bony finger to and fro in front of us, like the wind-screen wiper on a car, and mouthed ‘fermé’. And that was that.
Ruan joined us, and we retired to a café where, with no more than a wave of his hand, Leon ordered a carafe of red wine and three glasses. Ruan watched the waiter fill each glass and then announced that neither of us would be drinking it, and ordered mineral waters. Leon poured two of the glasses back into the carafe, and smacking his lips, embarked upon the remaining glass. In the corner a pair of musicians, an accordionist and a violinist, tuned up wheezily and embarked upon a repertoire of slow reels. The accordionist was very fat, with stubby legs and a red face, and from our vantage point across the café I had the impression that the vigorous movements of his meaty hands were in fact intended to stop his sagging torso from collapsing onto the floor.
‘That accordion player bears a slight resemblance to Nikolai Podgorny,’ Leon said to Ruan, in French. Ruan glanced at me and I pretended I had not understood. ‘I once met him, you know,’ Leon went on. ‘Podgorny, I mean. He was a great friend of the New Zealand legation in Moscow. Used to come for a drink or dinner every few months, and to ask us to act as go-betweens with the major powers. You know, to convey delicate messages to the Brits or the Yanks rather than lose face by saying it direct. Gentle regrets, apologies, offers to trade captured spies, that sort of thing.’
‘Interesting work, I imagine,’ Ruan said.
Leon nodded and said, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ And throwing some francs onto the table he seized my hand again and we were off.
Somewhere else turned out to be a crowded bistro, where Leon ordered three plats du jour and as we ate he engaged Ruan in a conversation about the jazz greats each had heard over the years in Paris, a subject in which Ruan appeared surprisingly expert – Art Blakey at the Club Saint-Germain, Jimmy Smith at Le Caveau de la Huchette, Wes Montgomery, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong . . .
‘And Nikolai Podgorny?’ Ruan said, folding up his napkin and placing it beside his empty plate.
Leon held a finger against his lips and glanced furtively around him. ‘The walls have ears,’ he said. ‘Come with me, I have something to show you.’
We took the metro to the Latin Quarter, to a bar Leon said had just opened. We were shown to a table at the back, far from the stage, and Leon and Ruan each took turns at talking into the other’s ear, with Ruan scratching notes with a pencil on the flyleaf of his volume of Proust. Presently the band made its way to the stage, accompanied by enthusiastic hooting and whistling from around the room. It was a quartet of black men in dark suits and thin ties, led by a pianist in a furry hat and a goat’s beard. Ruan’s jaw dropped and he placed his hand on top of Leon’s to stop him talking. Their eyes met.
‘Yes,’ said Leon matter-of-factly. ‘One night only.’
Ruan summoned a passing waiter and ordered red wine, ignoring my censorious glance. He closed the volume of Proust and placed his hands over it protectively, and then gave himself over to the music, barely acknowledging my presence for the next two hours as he breathlessly followed the movements of the hatted pianist. It was an odd performance. The man seemed not so much to play his instrument as to taunt it like a cat with a mouse. He would glare at the keyboard, stabbing at groups of keys with his fingers, rubbing his palms together as if to warm them, and waiting until the last moment to embark upon long phrases of melody which seemed then to be left hanging, whereupon he would feign a double-take as if to say to the piano, ‘Is that all you can do?’ From time to time he would get up from his seat and, repeatedly wiping his face with a cloth, would wander over to the drummer or the saxophone player and complement their solo turns with a shuffling dance to all points of the compass, jerking his arms up and down like a marionette. The audience hooted and clapped.
During the final set Leon announced that he had to leave us for a short while to use the telephone. ‘So do you think our friend a fraud?’ I asked Ruan. ‘Has he told you anything useful or is he just making it up?’
‘Why would he?’ Ruan said.
‘For the pleasure of our company, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps. Is our company that pleasant for him?’
‘It seems to be the case. What will you do next with this information?’
‘You are not permitted to ask such questions,’ Ruan said angrily, and then his face softened into a smile and he put his volume of Proust away in his pocket. ‘Let’s go. We owe this man nothing, and I have no authority to undertake espionage, other than a general obligation to keep my ears open.’ He took out some bank notes and placed them under a tumbler on the table. ‘If he has anything to offer us I’m sure he will be in touch.’
The next morning an envelope was delivered to my lodgings, and as I collected it from the concierge the telephone on her desk rang. It was Ruan. ‘You’ll be interested to know I have done some research,’ he said. ‘Our friend claims he was attached to the New Zealand legation in Moscow, but it was closed down in 1950. There is no New Zealand representative in Moscow.’
‘That settles it then,’ I said.
‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ Ruan said, and added, ‘I have not felt it necessary to inform my superiors about this.’
I let the silence continue for ten or twenty seconds, listening to Ruan’s breathing on the line. ‘Very well,’ I said at last. ‘If that’s your judgement then I won’t inform my superiors either.’
Ruan laughed softly. I rang off, and opened the envelope. Inside was a sketch folded neatly into quarters.
*
I still have the portrait Leon drew of Ruan and me, on a sheet of thick paper using a wedge of charcoal clutched awkwardly between his fingers and thumb. We are seated outside a café on a cobblestoned street, with the monstrous blancmange of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur looming over us. Ruan holds a book in one hand, upon whose spine one can just make out the word ‘fugitive’, and is coolly examining the cigarette in his other hand. I am leaning forward over a musical score, pencil stub in hand, but am gazing directly at the artist with an intensity that could be either anger or curiosity. Even after thirty years I cannot say which.
*
Winter arrived in Paris and, confined indoors at the embassy compound, I noticed how the talk amongst the diplomatic staff turned more to the strange political goings-on back home. It was clear that a split had developed amongst the Party leadership. The circle of comrades who traced their pedigree to the Long March and beyond, who had liberated China from the Japanese and fought off the Nationalists and their American backers, who had united the peasants and the military and the bourgeois and had summoned home a scattered generation of Chinese intellectuals from the four corners of the globe, that line of hardened revolutionaries my parents had seen atop Tiananmen in November 1949 had now split into several ‘lines’, like a piece of porcelain cracking under the strain of its years. Mao Zedong had disappeared from public view in November, shortly before his seventy-third birthday, and rumours abounded regarding his health and his whereabouts. In Beijing the Group of Five gained the ascendancy, led by Peng Zhen and Deng Xiao Ping, but their hold on power – in particular their power over the army – seemed tenuous, as if they were driving a truck whose steering column had come loose. Fissures appeared within our midst too, with a faction of incrementalists and a faction of revolutionaries contending within the embassy, shadowboxing in the corridors and doorways, trading insults and feints, concerning themselves not with the substance of any political argument, but with the nuances of each other’s language, of whether by the choice of a word or a phrase one could unequivocally announce one’s membership of one ‘line’ or another.
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, appeared in Shanghai, refusing to be drawn upon her husband’s whereabouts, and announcing confidently that a struggle was brewing over culture, that art and form were now the battleground, rather than politics and economics. ‘That sounds like a genteel form of combat,’ I commented to Ruan. ‘A war fought with pens and paper and musical instruments and calligraphy brushes.’ Ruan looked at me askance. ‘You of all people should know better than that,’ he said. ‘Snake poison may take days to kill you, but a poisonous ideology will do the job in minutes.’ As if to illustrate his point, Ruan told me that Madame Mao had appointed Yu Huiyong as Chairman of the Shanghai Cultural Revolutionary Committee. It was also rumoured that the Shanghai Conservatory would soon be closed down. That was all he could say for certain. There were other rumours, but they had been contradicted, and Ruan did not want to perpetuate them. I asked him what else he had heard, about the Party leadership, about Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao Ping, but he shook his head and said, ‘It is not for us to know, not yet, at least, and perhaps not ever. Surely you understand that by now.’
It was not until July that Mao reappeared, first in Shanghai and then famously in Wuhan, where he jumped into the Yangtse River and swam with the current for two hours, lecturing his entourage of supporters and peasants on the finer points of collectivisation. ‘Just like in the Dumpling Baths incident,’ I suggested to Ruan, but he claimed never to have heard of it.
Mao’s swim in the Yangtse, like my father’s in the Songhua, was a signal to those in the know that an elaborate series of traps was now primed and ready. In the weeks and months that followed, an old order was swept away. Ruan passed on to me the news from Shanghai as it came through. We learned that Ho Luting was humiliated by Yu Huiyong and imprisoned, that his wife and children were forced to criticise him, that one of his daughters committed suicide rather than take part. We learned that my friend Ling Ling had been exiled to a village in distant Gansu Province (where she would remain for more than a decade, forgotten, and forbidden from performing). We learned that the head of the department of piano, Fa Jilin, was beaten by her former students, and that the pianist Liu Shikun was sent to Taicheng Prison in Beijing. It would be years until all of the stories came out. Some never did, of course. I was pregnant with my twins before I learned what had happened to Tian Mei Yun, that he had gone home to Suzhou and gassed himself and his mother in their apartment.
Later that year I was in Turin performing a series of concerts, and had just finished a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Romances in the concert hall when Ruan handed me a telegram from the embassy in Paris. I had been recalled to China, it said. Ruan told me that I was booked to travel that night from Turin to Vienna and then to Prague, where we would catch a plane.
‘We?’
‘I am to accompany you.’
‘I need a bodyguard, do I?’
‘I have been recalled too. No doubt Beijing has its reasons.’
I felt Ruan searching my face for some kind of clue, of what I wasn’t sure. Nor was I sure what my face might be expressing. Apprehension? Resolution? Indifference? I found myself closing my eyes and saying, with a sense of vertigo, ‘Can we not, for once, doubt Beijing’s reasons?’
I kept my eyes closed, not wanting to see what Ruan’s face might be registering. I wanted only to hear his words, sensing that they alone, stripped of all other impressions, would tell me whether I could trust him.
‘It’s true, one can always consider the alternative,’ he said softly. ‘But you know as well as I do that we are encouraged to behave as if we had no choice. At some point in the past, perhaps so long ago we cannot remember exactly when, we have made a decision not to have choice.’
‘I don’t recall doing that,’ and I was about to add that, even if I had, I now wanted to reconsider. But I kept my thoughts to myself.
‘Very few of us do recall,’ Ruan said. ‘But what is the alternative for you, anyway? Surely you recognise your situation. You are not simply a musician. You are in very deep. You know things, you carry secrets, you have . . . intelligence that may be of interest to the West.’
‘What things?’ I opened my eyes and looked sharply at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I have read your file in full,’ he said. ‘I know what it was you were doing in Shanghai, and it is safe to assume that our hosts here know something of it too, and also our friends at the Soviet embassy. So if you throw yourself onto the mercy of the West they will want to know everything you know. And the Soviets will want to stop that happening, to shut you up.’
‘Why would they . . .’ I began, but certain truths about my life in Paris had begun to fall into place, like the tumblers in a lock.
‘Imagine that China – the China for which we struggle – is not so much a country,’ he said, ‘as a game played on a vast chess board, and that it is not limited to sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces, but involves a hundred million squares – two hundred million . . . so many they can hardly be counted – and millions upon millions of pieces, spread across every province, every corner of the Motherland and also across all of the continents: a chess game without borders. Here, as in Beijing or Shanghai or Harbin, there are games within larger games, in which the placement of each piece has its purpose and its significance, gives comfort to some and causes alarm to others. The players themselves are numerous and ever-changing, deploying their pieces for attack, for defence, for posturing, for threatening, and of course for sacrificing, and all for reasons that may become apparent immediately, or after another five moves, or ten, or a hundred, or remain hidden forever.’
‘And I am a pawn?’ I sighed. ‘Is that all you are telling me? What a cliché! As if I didn’t know that.’
‘No, no, you are not a pawn; it is me that is the pawn,’ Ruan said, tapping his chest. ‘You are something more powerful; you, I would say, are a knight, since you can do things no other piece can. You are uniquely gifted, but that makes you uniquely troublesome and uniquely vulnerable. Your abilities make you a magnet for others – they make you valuable, and also dangerous.’
‘And who are these players?’ I asked.
‘There are many players,’ he said. ‘Their number and identity changes all of the time. I don’t know who placed you here or who has permitted you to stay so long in Paris. Perhaps it was the work of several people, perhaps unknown to each other, or even enemies to each other, but sharing a common interest in placing you here.’
‘And now in recalling me.’
‘Perhaps, but remember you have been here six years; the game has changed and the players have changed. You don’t know who will be aided by your return, and who will be threatened, and what that will mean for you. You will have to find that out for yourself, if you can.’
‘And you too? You will find out why you have been recalled?’
‘That also is true. But let me say just one more thing, the only thing that one can say for sure about the players: that each of them is also a chess piece, is also in the game, is a part in the stratagems of others, knowingly or unknowingly. No one is outside of the game. That is the important thing to remember. Bring to mind the faces of our leaders, the members of the politburo. Do you not realise that each of them also stands alone upon his single foot of jade or bone, on a single square of black or white, vulnerable to attack from all points of the compass, and in particular from the blind-side attack of a knight?’
‘Of a knight such as me?’
‘A knight such as you.’
‘I find that hard to imagine.’
‘In that case it will not happen,’ Ruan said. ‘Those who survive do so by imagining. That is what I have always believed, but perhaps what I am telling you no longer applies. The reports from the Motherland make me fear that the rules have changed. Perhaps no stratagem can survive this new revolution that Madame Mao has called. All I can say is that if you fail to imagine yourself as having power, then you will be certain not to have it.’
‘So what should I do?’ I said. ‘What will you do?’
I studied the glassy surface of Ruan’s eyes, searching for a passage through them into his thoughts, trying to make him betray himself. I could see nothing.
‘I will think,’ he said. ‘Think and strategise. My parents and my younger brother live in Chongqing, and because I am in the game it means they are too. So my advice to you is to think about your family, about your mother and what your actions may mean for her, your mother’ – and here he hesitated for a fraction of a second – ‘whose health is not good.’
‘What do you know about my mother’s health? Who told you? What have you heard?’
Ruan held up his palm towards me to calm me. ‘Let me be completely frank,’ he said. ‘I was advised that, if you resisted the idea of returning home, I should tell you that your mother is unwell and needs you. That is all I know.’
‘So this may be a lie, a ruse to entice me back?’
Ruan was silent for a while, and then pulled his face into his sweet half-smile and said, with a note of triumph, ‘See, you are already strategising. You are thinking like a player rather than a chess piece. You are already playing the game.’
In that moment I sensed that the world had changed, although I did not know quite how. I became aware of the space around us, the noise of people moving in the auditorium, the currents of cool air, the dark vault above us. ‘I will think about my mother, then,’ I said.
‘Do,’ he said. ‘Our train leaves for Vienna at midnight, so we will go to the station immediately after the performance.’
*
My mind remained curiously restful in the hours before the concert. I thought briefly of my mother, but she soon faded from my mind. I returned to my hotel and packed my suitcase, and when we returned to the concert hall several hours later I stashed it alongside Ruan’s in my dressing room. The curtain rose and I watched from the wings as the orchestra marched its way through a Bruckner symphony. Ruan was waiting with me, as he always did, to see me safely onto the stage before taking his seat in the auditorium.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this afternoon,’ I said to him, without facing him.
‘You have? That’s good.’
‘And I have a proposal to make.’
‘A proposal?’
‘Quite literally.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘My proposal is that when we get to Prague we ask the ambassador there to marry us, before we set out for home.’
‘To marry us? You and me?’
‘Why not? There are times when a knight comes to realise that she needs a close ally, even if he is only a pawn. A knight and a pawn working together can be a strong combination.’
‘I’m not sure I quite understand you.’
‘You surprise me. I thought you would understand perfectly.’
‘That a knight needs a pawn? Yes, I can understand that – although the pawn might seem to have the greater need.’
‘Be that as it may,’ I said, ‘the important thing is . . . it counts as a move in the game, an act of imagining, a way of taking the initiative.’
‘I see. You are thinking that if we arrive home and announce that we are married then it would, at the very least, put some people off their stride.’
‘I’m sorry if this all seems . . . dispassionate and cold.’
‘You don’t need to apologise for that. If only more marriages began that way.’
‘So you’ll consider it?’ I said. I turned to face him and took hold of the sleeve of his jacket, turning the buttons on his cuffs with my fingertips. His face was half in shadow, but I could see that he was blinking rapidly, making his own calculations, the nature of which was hidden from me, although frankly they were of no importance to me. ‘Don’t answer me now. I’ve got a performance to give. Wait until we’re on the train to Vienna. We can discuss it then.’ Very slowly I raised my hand to his cheek and touched his cool, damp skin. He took my fingers and drew them into his hands, and held them gently, but firmly, as I imagined he had held the sparrow.
‘When did this idea occur to you?’ he asked.
‘I just thought of it.’ I said. ‘This very moment, as I was putting my suitcase in the dressing room alongside yours.’
‘Well, I will consider your proposal,’ he said. ‘Very seriously, as it deserves.’
‘While I’m playing you can think it through,’ I said, and I opened the violin case on the table before me and lifted Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume into the half-light. ‘And now let me be alone for a while. I have a performance to think about. We’ll talk again on the train.’
I turned away from him, and heard his footsteps withdraw into the corridor behind me. Bruckner rolled onward like a heavy sea, and I allowed it to carry my thoughts in its swell for another half hour, whereupon, after the business of applauding and bowing and standing and sitting was concluded, I was summoned to the stage. I looked out into the auditorium. It was a full house, I had been told, but the footlights illuminated only the front few rows, where Ruan sat in his customary seat surrounded by the Piedmontese intelligentsia, glistening in their tuxedos and furs like a fringe of foamy breakers tumbling onto the filigreed carpet from out of the dark sea of humanity behind them. I nodded to the conductor and raised my bow; Beethoven’s first Romance flowed steadily from my violin. After I had finished I bowed my head and felt the applause falling like a shower of rain upon my head, a light shower, it seemed to me, for some in the audience were clearly unsure if it was the done thing to applaud between two works that were, perhaps, of one piece.
When it had ceased I caught the conductor’s eye once more and struck the first note of the second Romance. And although my audience heard me play Beethoven, in the key of F major, in some other part of my mind I had slipped through a wall, and was again playing Bach’s double violin concerto, in the key of D minor. I felt once again the snaking presence of David Oistrakh’s violin around mine, and then as the melody unfolded I stepped through a curtain into a timeless world where I was standing on a high ridge, and music was flowing past me and through me, pressing around my form like a cold wind rising up from a vast dark plain behind me, from a great abyss of feeling – my own, and that of my parents, and Kasimir and Piroshka and Dmitri Dmitrievich, and so many others with them – and the only outlet for that feeling was the curved soundbox of my violin, of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. I sensed that it was inexhaustible, that I could keep playing for my whole lifetime and it would never be spent. The music carried me forward, bar by bar, theme by theme, and I felt that I was playing something more than what either composer had written, something universal: the music of the turning world. But it was not endless, indeed, as Director Ho had said, music is not endless or infinite, but instead carries within itself the promise that once it has played itself out, no matter if it takes decades or centuries or millennia, it will resolve itself once more into silence. In that moment it occurred to me that if I ever spoke again with Director Ho I would tell him that I had fulfilled his wish for music and China, that I had played out in its fullness that vast but ultimately finite domain of melody and harmony. I would tell him that I had heard the song that the Emperor Huangdi had tuned his lyre to centuries ago in that high mountain glade, and that now I could, if he wished, restore the yellow bell pitch to China. For as my performance in Turin came to its end, I realised that I had heard the song of the phoenix as a young child without knowing what it was, that I had learned it by heart and carried it within me all these years. It was the simple note sounded by the bell on my father’s bicycle, the new bell that he bought after his stroke, the key into which he would transpose all of his favourite tunes as he rode to work: the key of D, or D minor.
I lowered my arms and bowed my head, bathed in yellow light, holding Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume by its neck in one hand and my bow, sprouting several loose strands of horsehair, in the other. There was silence, and for a moment I thought that some miracle had occurred – that I would look up to find that my audience had aged thirty years during the quarter hour of my performance and were now staring, dumbstruck, at the wizened skin of their hands and faces. But in the next moment I was enveloped by a waterfall of noise, a roaring column of bright light and sound that weighed down upon my head and shoulders and obliterated all sense. I felt the air compress me from all sides, forcibly emptying my lungs, and, finding myself unable to breathe, I ran from the stage and leaned against a wall, gasping. Then I felt a cool breeze behind me, and turning around saw an open fire-door at the end of a short corridor. It led out onto the adjacent alleyway, and I saw through a stone arch onto an empty piazza whose cobblestones were carpeted in a luminous blue moonlight. I ran to my dressing room, laid my violin in its case, and put on my coat. I threw open Ruan’s suitcase and was relieved to find two diplomatic passports, mine and his, lying on top of his folded clothes. I stuffed my passport into the pocket of my coat and picked up my violin and my suitcase. Then I turned back and seized Ruan’s passport as well and made my way along the corridor towards the door.
The audience was getting restless. They had been clapping for several minutes, and yet I had not reappeared. It would surely be only a few more seconds before someone came looking for me. I turned and walked out into the alley.
*
I did not sleep during the journey to Marseille, nor on the train I caught from there to Paris. I did think of my mother, as Ruan had suggested, although no picture of her came into my mind, nor any of the emotions that I expected to feel. What came to my mind was a disembodied voice (I was not even certain it was hers) repeating to me the proverb she had recited at the beach house near Shanghai the last time I had seen her:
Nu ren xin, hai di zhen.
A woman’s heart, a needle at the bottom of the ocean.
*
I was the last passenger to disembark at the Gare de Lyon. I walked along the corridors from carriage to carriage, looking out of the windows at the people on the platform, trying to spot an official from the embassy or a member of the gendarmerie. I could see none, and no one tried to stop me as I descended from the train. I found myself on the steps of the station and realised I had nowhere to go. Clearly I could not go to the Conservatory. I had a few friends in the Paris music scene, but I had only ever visited them in the company of Ruan; he had their names and addresses, and since they had been sanctioned by the embassy I could not be sure they would protect me.
I decided it was best to lie low for a few days; so I checked into a small hotel on the Left Bank – not knowing how I was going to pay my bill, since Ruan allowed me very little money of my own, most of which I had spent on my train tickets – and stayed in my room all day, dreading every footstep on the stairs. I only ventured out at night to find food. I knew that Leon worked at the Opera at nights, so after a few days I thought I would find a vantage point nearby, and wait there until the evening’s performance was finished and try to spot him leaving for home, wherever that was. I found a place behind a pillar on the building opposite the staff entrance, wrapped a coat around myself and waited. I don’t know what happened on the first night. Perhaps he wasn’t working, or perhaps I fell asleep at the wrong moment. But he was there on the second night, and left with a friend at around eleven o’clock. I checked to see that no one was following them, and then shadowed them to a tiny bistro a couple of blocks away.
I stood outside in the cold for a while, wondering if I should go in. Would they know I was missing? What were their loyalties? I felt sure Leon would help me, but who was the other man? I decided to go in. I decided not to have any choice. The place was dimly lit, and almost empty. Leon noticed me immediately, and he waved to me and beckoned me to his table. He introduced his friend as Thierry, the stage manager, and invited me to dine with them. We ate together and for an hour neither of them said a word about what I was doing there. We talked about Paris and New Zealand and China, with Leon translating my Russian into French for Thierry, and I learned a great deal about Leon: that his first job in Paris had been as an electrician at the Moulin Rouge; that his father was a noted artist in his home country; and that, despite being a Protestant, he attended Mass every week at Notre Dame de Paris. (I remember Thierry objecting strongly to this. ‘Ach, to waste the body of Christ on heretics who presume to drink his blood!’ he proclaimed with a snort. I asked for an explanation and both of them looked at my puzzled expression and then at each other. Leon began to explain to me the doctrine of transubstantiation, how the wafer and wine were transformed into Christ’s flesh and blood by the prayer of the celebrant, but he had not got very far when Thierry leaned over and drunkenly kissed him on both cheeks, saying, ‘Je vous salue, mon frère, pleine de grâce.’ And Leon patted his stomach and said, ‘Pleine de grasse, you mean.’)
Then Leon ordered some brandy, and as he poured some into a glass for me he said, ‘You’re running away, aren’t you?’ Without waiting for a response, he turned immediately to Thierry and poured him a glass, whispering, ‘Elle veut echapper.’ And Thierry said ‘En effet?’ and looked at me with eyes wide in excitement.
‘Yes, I’m trying to,’ I said, ‘but I need some help.’ So the three of us discussed my situation right there in the bistro, as the staff closed up the kitchen and set the tables for the next day’s lunch, and started to turn out the lights. Thierry wrote down the name of an uncle and aunt in Brittany who he was sure would harbour me for as long as I wanted. They had been in the resistance during the war, he explained, and could not turn away anyone who was hiding from authority. I don’t know how serious the plan was, but Leon took down the directions to their farm and assured me he would get me there within twenty-four hours.
Then we walked to my hotel. Thierry lived in a street just beyond it, so he accompanied us most of the way. The concierge was not very happy to see me bringing a man up to my room at one-thirty in the morning, but Leon waved a small white name card in front of her face and muttered, ‘Sécurité diplomatique’ and she let us pass. I asked him why he did that, and he said he had seen it in a movie. I looked at the card in his hand. On it was printed the name of my violin teacher with the crest of the Paris Conservatoire. When we got to my room, I started packing my things. I asked Leon if he trusted Thierry not to call the police, and he said, ‘I don’t think it matters now.’ I looked up to find him at the window, looking down onto the street below. ‘I think our friend from the embassy has been following us.’ And sure enough, there was Ruan standing under a lamp-post looking up at the hotel. As we watched, he crossed the street towards us. ‘Keep the chain on the door,’ Leon said, and he slipped out of the room.
I waited for a few minutes, listening for the noise of some kind of fracas downstairs. But nothing happened. Then there was a gentle knock on the door, and, thinking it was Leon, I opened it, leaving the chain on. It was Ruan.
‘Welcome back to China,’ he said, pressing his weight against the door.
‘But there’s still a chain between us,’ I said, pushing back, ‘and I have decided to go away.’
‘Where to?’ he said.
‘Anywhere that isn’t the centre of the universe,’ I said.
I could see only half of Ruan’s face. His cheek was flushed and his eye was watery, and for a moment I thought he might offer to help me escape. He had come alone, after all, and would not by himself have been able to manhandle me back to the embassy.
‘But you are in danger, Comrade,’ he said. ‘Don’t you realise who’ – and at that his eyes turned up into his head and he slumped against the door, his face sliding down the crack until he was jerked away from behind, and I heard a series of thumps as he fell onto the carpet of the landing.
When I opened the door Leon was down on his knees beside Ruan. In one hand he held a Parisian cobblestone. ‘I got him! I got him!’ he was saying excitedly. Then he appeared to embrace him, putting his ear to Ruan’s chest to make sure he was breathing. ‘He’s alive, thank God,’ Leon said, ‘but he’s out cold. It’ll be at least an hour before he wakes up.’ I didn’t ask Leon how he knew that. I guess he had seen it in a movie too.
We left Ruan in the hallway and made our escape, walking briskly down towards the Seine, arguing about which station the trains for Brittany left from. I could tell from the spring in his step that Leon was delighted to be running away with an exotic woman, and, I have to say, a part of me was delighted to be the exotic woman he was running away with. The other part of me felt guilty, because I was running away from my responsibility to the masses, to my people, to my mother, and yet, like Xian Xinghai in the movie, my body felt lighter, as if I had somehow stepped through into a world where gravity was lessened. The burden that had weighed on me like a cloak of lead since I was a child had been removed, and now I was able to float unencumbered into the air.
Then, as we were starting to cross the Pont Neuf, there were some footsteps behind us and Leon went sprawling forward onto the road. It was Ruan again. He pounced onto Leon’s back and began hitting him (like a diplomat rather than a spy, I suppose, because Leon easily managed to shake him off), and the two of them struggled and punched while I, to my shame, picked up my suitcase and my violin and stood there watching. They rolled across the flagstone footpath, more like overgrown schoolboys playing rough than a representative of the East wrestling with a representative of the West for the privilege of walking away with me. I stood over them as they fought wordlessly, and I remember vignettes from amidst the blurry soup of their bodies and coats: Ruan’s fingers splayed out across Leon’s cheek; Leon seizing Ruan’s belt buckle and hoisting him off the ground; and one of Ruan’s shoes skittering into the gutter and coming to rest upside down in a puddle, from which I immediately rescued it. A taxi swung its headlights around a nearby corner and paused momentarily, casting onto the bridge’s solid handrail the flickering shadows of the two men, which then merged into a single shadow flighting with itself. I waited for the sound of car doors opening, of shouts, of offers of help, but nothing came. The taxi turned away. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Maybe I should try to stop them; maybe Ruan actually wants to help; maybe he believes Leon wants to harm me.’ And before I did anything with my thoughts the two men struggled to their feet and split asunder. I rushed forward and interposed myself and we became a six-legged animal – pushing against each other, hip grinding on hip, arms and fists swinging, fingers clutching, swaying together, slamming against the stone rail of the Pont Neuf – and then . . . I was falling through space, with Ruan beside me, the air rushing past my face and reaching its cold fingers into the crevices of my clothing like a pickpocket. I landed with my hips on something soft and my shoulder on something hard and flinty, and rolled face first into the river. The cold was shocking. The water enveloped my legs and torso, pulling me into the flow. My hands closed around a large flat rock which wobbled under my weight, and I looked up to the riverbank. Leon was racing down the steps towards me, carrying my violin and suitcase. He put them down on the tow-path, stepped into the water and clasped my right hand. As he pulled me up onto dry land a pain shot through my arm and into my shoulder and my chest. I collapsed onto the embankment unable to breathe until I rolled onto my left side. Leon was standing above me. ‘Oh, Christ!’ I heard him say.
Ruan had fallen face-down. His legs were in the water, but his upper half was on a broken slab of concrete that sloped down into the river. I couldn’t see any movement. Then, as his clothes became waterlogged, the river started to tug Ruan into its flow. Fraying ropes of water wrapped themselves around his limbs and torso; I saw the water turn him over, open his raincoat and pull at his shirt, then one arm went under and he slipped sideways and disappeared. Leon jumped into the river, plunged his hands into the water and caught hold of Ruan by the armpits, but he had no footing and the effort of pulling Ruan upwards simply drew both of them in deeper. Leon fell backwards and released his hold, and as the river pulled them both towards the faster water in the centre of the channel I saw Leon’s arms flailing – whether to save himself or to reach Ruan I could not tell. Moments later they were both gone.
I got to my feet, seized my case and, with great difficulty and pain, positioned my violin under my left arm and began to run along the tow-path, scanning the surface of the dark river, calling out to Leon and Ruan. After a hundred metres or so I found Leon sitting on the riverbank with his head in his hands, moaning to himself repeatedly, ‘Oh Jesus, oh shit.’ I knelt down beside him. ‘Oh Jesus, oh shit,’ he said again.
I knelt beside Leon for several minutes, listening to him shivering and muttering his pointless little mantra under his breath. Then suddenly I was possessed by an idea. I opened my suitcase and took from it only my father’s notebook and my pouch of letters, leaving the two diplomatic passports tucked amongst my clothes. I closed it again, swung my left arm back and threw the suitcase into the river. I pulled off my coat and my shoes and threw them in too. And I was about to throw Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in, except Leon arose from his stupor and grabbed it from my hands.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘I’m faking my own death,’ I said. ‘I’m drowning myself in the Seine.’
I wrenched the violin case from his grasp, stepped into the river and released it into the flow, standing back and watching it float away, as one watches a child riding free for the first time on a bicycle. I watched it catch the water’s first ridge, ride into a shallow trough, turn on its axis and spin gaily through one eddy and into another, and then finally skate out onto the powerful thrust of the river’s core, where it wobbled and straightened and righted itself, and then gathered speed until it was lost from sight.
*
So my years of happiness began on a train bound for Nantes, sitting in wet clothes between two provincial matrons, fashioning for myself a makeshift sling for my sore arm, wondering if, like Kasimir’s, it might be permanently damaged, and indeed embracing the notion of a wound that would end my playing days. (As it turned out I had suffered only severe bruising, and it was other circumstances that kept me from playing the violin for several years.) Leon sat opposite me in the train carriage, grinning from time to time. As for Ruan, they fished his body from the river the following morning, and found my empty suitcase and my coat and one shoe half a kilometre further downstream. We read about it in the papers once we were safely in Nantes with Thierry’s uncle and aunt: ‘Body identified as Chinese diplomat’. And then, the next day, ‘Chinese violinist missing, feared drowned in Seine’. One paper speculated on some kind of crime of passion, a doomed affair between Ruan and me. Another had it on good authority that we were both trying to defect.
For the next year Leon and I lived as fugitives in the French provinces, working in small towns and on farms, moving frequently, enjoying the very act of surviving. We had our secret codes and emergency meeting places and our stashes of emergency cash. We rehearsed our alibis, invented histories and tragedies and comedies, and as our circumstances required that we pose as man and wife we became just that. I wish I could say that we uncovered some depth of emotion, but in the end it was only our shared knowledge that held us together.
I was pregnant with Miro when we gave ourselves up to a police chief in Lyon, who held us in the cells while he placed phone calls to Paris, then took our statements and, eyeing the lump at my belly censoriously, escorted us around the corner to the office of his cousin, a notaire, who duly married us. Somehow it emerged through discussions in Paris amongst diplomats and officials of various departments – discussions in which we took no part – that the obvious place for our child to be born was Berlin.
*
The clock said eight-forty. Miro would call again at nine o’clock. This has been our arrangement for years, to call every hour on the hour until a connection is made. I rose from my chair and took an LP from the shelf, Shostakovich’s second piano concerto (too gushy, too beautiful to be by Shostakovich, one would think, unless there is some hidden code or purpose or message within it; even so I confess to liking it). I laid it on the turntable and lifted the needle arm carefully to position it in the shiny groove between the first and second tracks. As the music began to play I walked to the window and looked out over the city.
In the darkness the fronds of the Canary Island palms rattled for a moment and then fell silent. A ship was nosing its way silently into the inner folds of the harbour, lights hanging like magnesium flares from its dark flanks, and as the fronds shifted in the breeze they hid the ship for a while and then revealed it again, each time slightly closer to its destination.
Another plane sprang from behind Mount Victoria, and I found it strange that, despite all the power and fury of its engines, I could hear nothing other than the music in the room, the plane seeming to float through the air, propelled by the power of a piano and an orchestra. My thoughts floated with it. Music, I reflected, is indeed the language of doubt and of doubters. At least that was so during my era in China, when no other language was available to us.
I thought now of mythical birds, of the phoenix and the phoenix song. Of the phantoms that entrance us, that we try to grasp and to make our own, the elusive things that we must go to the mountain to find, that are passed from generation to generation through characters written with a fingertip on the palm of a hand. I thought of the ten thousand planes between my father’s finger and thumb, and of poor, sweet Ruan, sliding into the cold embrace of the Seine, and then, in turn, of my family and my friends, of the living and the dead. And as the hand of the clock moved towards the hour, I tried what I suspect most of us try to do on occasion: to assemble the life we have so far lived, and all the people we have known, into one harmonious sequence, a song unfolding in time – lost, found, and once again lost.