The man laughed. The sound was so unexpected, Ba Lute started and knocked over his empty cup. The man quickly righted it. “You’re right. The trombonist gave me that name,” he said. “It stuck.”
Ba Lute was so thirsty even his eyes felt dry. An image came to him of this room and all the past rooms he had known, he tried to see how all the doorways and entrances fit together, but none of the corners would hold still. “Tell me your requirements,” he said finally.
“My friend, you misunderstand me.”
“I would like permission to visit them. Are they being detained nearby?”
“Comrade,” the man said, “that is not possible.” He blinked rapidly as if his feelings had been injured. “They were sentenced to labour in the Northwest. In the meantime, the revolutionary committee had no choice but to demolish their hut.”
So the letter had not exaggerated, Ba Lute thought. They were gone.
One-two stood up from the desk. “You must know how things are. You are justly celebrated! A champion of the land reform campaign, a triumphant musical foot soldier. We hardened ourselves at Headquarters, didn’t we? We were the first to be reformed through struggle. As Chairman Mao says, true rebellion is not organized or beautiful. Heroes like you built the road. I’m only following the path.”
How could such flattering words feel like mockery? The office was terribly clean, terribly bright.
“More tea?” the man asked.
“No. Thank you.”
“Is there something else I might assist you with?”
Ba Lute stood, raising himself up to his full height. The village head shifted uncomfortably. “Thank you, Comrade,” Ba Lute said. “You’ve been very helpful. I’m sure we’ll have the chance to speak again.”
“Now I remember,” the man said, though of course he had never forgotten. “The wife of my deputy met your wife on the bus and, though the journey was only a day, they formed a bond together. Since then, she has kept a watchful eye on Zhuli. Delivering her to safety.”
Ba Lute felt the walls shifting once again.
“One should be careful of the sun,” the man said, as if talking to himself. He reached out, pulled the string, and the fan started up once more. “One should learn to practise in the shade.”
—
The cold forced its way in. Even though Swirl had emptied her suitcase and wore every piece of clothing she owned, there was no way to defeat it. Just now at the tap, she had watched, mesmerized, as her hands submerged in water and she had failed to register any sensation. It was as if the hands belonged to someone else. She had yanked them out, frightened, nonsensically, that the fingers would shatter. Nothing around her was what it seemed. The air, thick blue, appeared like paper.
She shared a single long bed with a district leader, a doctor, an economist, a public security officer, a schoolteacher, a tax lawyer and a translator of Russian literature. She, herself, was known as the wife. The first week, she had identified them by their sleeping habits: how they tossed, shouted and snored, how often they got up at night, how violently they squeezed back in, or if they slept as motionless as death. This morning, the district leader, convinced she had committed no crime, was speculating about her release date. “Perhaps today,” she said. “This month, certainly.”
“Comrade! Don’t you see this very idea makes you a perfect candidate for re-education?” The economist, who had been here the longest, was convinced no one would ever leave.
“I committed myself to the party when I was eleven years old! Without people like me, there would be no Revolution.”
“Hush. You’re the only one who still thinks of yourself as a revolutionary.”
The other women tittered but the district leader was unbothered. “I don’t expect a criminal like you to understand. The Party is my family and I would rather die than betray it.”
After roll call, they filed into the canteen. So many feet made a storm in the dust; it coloured the air, caked the floors and was the salt to everything that touched their lips. Swirl and the translator ate side by side. The translator chewed with her eyes tightly closed, making noises of gratitude as if, in her mind, she was relishing a succulent leg of duck.
Yesterday, Swirl had been handed a notice from the Bingpai revolutionary committee stating that Zhuli was now registered to live in Shanghai. The news had taken such a weight from Swirl that she, who never cried, had surprised everyone by weeping continuously. She had no news of Wen, only rumours that in the men’s camp not far away, no one survived. The corpses were left in the desert, unburied. Swirl would not allow herself to believe it.
Outside, beneath a sky that had turned from blue to paper white, they got in line to rinse their bowls. The colour of purity, Swirl thought. The ancients had imagined white as the colour of funerals, of fulfillment, loss and completion and now the white sky seemed ready to erase the earth. She hoisted up a basket and spade and joined her group. Try as she might, she couldn’t understand how she had walked to the cliff edge and found herself here. At the work site, several kilometres away, they were digging a channel. The soil, dry and easily eroded, fell apart under minimal pressure. She worked without thoughts; by midday, the sand glowed like a coin.
Night after night, stories were passed across the long bed. Months ticked by until at last she knew the intricate histories of all the women she slept beside, and they knew hers. A line of women who, one by one, had fallen through a rip in a dream and woken here. A lifetime ago, Swirl had gone to the ticketing office in Shanghai, ready to buy passage to Hong Kong, but she had been distracted by a novel, the Book of Records. It embarrassed her now, the way she burned candles so unthinkingly, gazing at words that seemed to hide ideas, or ideas inexpressible in words, how the sentences had carried her forward like a river or a piece of music. And yet how close the truth had seemed back then. She had been twenty-four years old and she had fallen in love.
Each day, the darkness fell fast. Black was the colour of the northern sky and therefore the heavens, the colour of the oceans, of everything profound and necessary, and so it must contain the life she was trying to reach. Her hands trembled all the time. On upholding her sentence, the head of the Bingpai revolutionary committee had assessed her coldly. He had concluded, “Deep in your heart you oppose the Communist Party.” Swirl had denied the accusation, but if hadn’t been true then, surely it was true now. Maybe her crime had been as simple as the inability to believe. In truth, since the age of fourteen, and until she met Wen, she had believed in almost nothing.
—
The life of a prisoner is one of endless motion. She was moved here and there, like a sack of goods. Dig ditches, mill flour, tend the pigs, grow vegetables, reform your thoughts, love the Party, collect firewood, denounce others, wash the grain, sing a song. The district leader, so sure she would be resurrected back to society, eventually committed suicide. The economist, adamant that the universe had forgotten them, was the first to be released. Day followed night, until Swirl suspected the Party itself no longer knew her whereabouts. No letters arrived and no word from Wen; she remembered sitting at the teahouse, waiting for instalments that would never come. The doctor told them of a camp not far away where a woman, who had been pregnant when she was sentenced, had given birth and the little boy had become the joy of the women’s dormitory; the story seemed impossible. How could a mother and infant survive in these conditions? Swirl dreamed of Big Mother and for days, consoled herself with childhood. In a dream, she sat beside her lost son, her parents, Wen, Zhuli. They talked about everything and then, when time ran out, they returned her to the dormitory, fitting her back like a book on a shelf.
Her one friend was the translator of Russian literature, and Swirl loved her. She would have given her the last fen in her pocket, the last piece of bread. The friend, quite famous, was the premier translator of the works of Dostoevsky.
On the long bed, the Translator had been the first to volunteer her story.
“It was during the Hu
ndred Flowers Campaign. They told us to criticize the Party, the university, each other, even the quality of our lunches and the functioning of the toilets.” The Translator turned over and so did all the women, one after another, like waves against the shore. “So I, the idiot, stepped forward and said that my request for permission to travel to Leningrad had been denied fourteen times, and that a scholar of my standing must engage with her contemporaries. While I carried on, everyone else ran for higher ground.
“What I later wondered,” the Translator said, laying an index finger gently on her own nose, “was how I could have studied Dostoevsky so keenly and not realized I was digging my own grave?” The word, Dostoevsky, made up of eight different ideograms, made them all murmur in admiration. “My old mother thinks I’ve been assigned to a university in Harbin. She’ll fall to heaven’s gate if she learns the truth.” The Translator thumped the bed with her hand, as if to chase away a ghost.
“We must not lose hope! Chairman Mao is a good man. He knows our qualities and he will rescue us.” The Translator pressed one hand to her heart as if to keep it from breaking. An echo of agreement rolled from woman to woman. “How can it be otherwise?”
—
There came a period of time when there was no food. These were months of desperation. Even labour was halted. The camp director agreed that energy would be better spent seeking wild grasses or roots. Famine was devastating the province; to give a single grain of millet to convicts would surely be a counter-revolutionary crime. Swirl had the sensation of pages fluttering before her eyes. It was the Translator, fanning her. She had the sensation of being rolled down a hallway. It was the Translator massaging her arms and legs. She dreamed she was eating a succulent duck leg. It was the Translator, who had stolen a handful of beans from the kitchen of the camp director, cooked them illicitly and fed them to her. She listened as someone read aloud from the Book of Records. It wasn’t real. It was the Translator holding her hand. Confused, Swirl asked, “Who will come to rescue us?”
The Translator said, with a small smile, “No one. So be it.”
At the end of the famine, there were only three left on their long bed: the Translator, the tax lawyer and Swirl. They slept curled together for warmth. The rest–the doctor, public security officer, schoolteacher and district leader–had gone, as the saying went, into the pure white sky, into the western heavens.
—
In 1963, the tax lawyer was released and Swirl and the Translator were transferred to a camp called Farm 835. For the first time, they were allowed to receive mail. Swirl was greeted with two envelopes of letters–from Big Mother and family, and from Zhuli–packets so thick they took up half her sleeping mat. She savoured one each day, as if each was a bowl of rice. The translator, alone in the world, had received nothing.
One day, they were preparing the Translator’s coat for winter, sewing layers of cotton batting into the lining. The Translator was sitting with her eyes closed. She had a washcloth resting on her feet in place of shoes.
A voice called out to them.
Swirl glanced up to see one of the guards beside a stranger, a visitor from an alien world. The stranger, a city person, wore blue slacks and a blue coat filmed in dust. The longer she looked at him, the more he seemed like a sign on the road, blurred and far away, difficult to read. He was tall and slender, handsome, perhaps in his early twenties.
“Aunt Swirl–”
She stared. The guard looked at her curiously. He said something to the young man, then turned and walked away, leaving the young man by himself.
“You know me, don’t you, Aunt Swirl?”
Her voice didn’t work. She tried again, but the words came out strangely. “Little Sparrow.”
The Translator opened her eyes. “A handsome gentleman, to be sure. But Comrade Swirl, this bird is not so little.”
He was standing before them now. Setting aside the coat and batting, Swirl got to her feet. She had to hold the Translator’s shoulder for support.
“Sparrow,” she said. “How strange it is to see you. This…” She shook her head to clear it. “This is my friend, the Lady Dostoevsky.”
“A pleasure to know you, Comrade!”
“Isn’t it though! Well, come nearer and let us have a look at you…”
Swirl wanted to reassure him but all the words within reach seemed too thin, too airy.
The high dome of the air swallowed their voices. “How did you arrive? There’s no transport for miles.”
“By train and bus. After Lanzhou, a donkey cart picked me up. For the last two days, we saw no one.”
The boy, but he was no longer a boy, looked overwhelmed. It was her, Swirl realized suddenly. She must be quite unrecognizable, and her appearance had upset him. She felt ashamed even though she knew that it had nothing to do with shame, only time and circumstances, and her powerlessness to change them. She was touched that he made light of the considerable journey from Shanghai, five full days of travel at least.
Sparrow began unpacking cartons of cigarettes, biscuits, rice, dried fish, salt, preserved vegetables, and box after box of soft sorghum candy.
The abundance was so unnerving, the Translator let out a soft curse. She leaned sideways. “So this is the nephew, eh? The composer destined to become the Beethoven of the Huangpu River? Are you sure that’s what he does?”
Perhaps out of embarrassment or panic Sparrow tried to surround them with words. He said everyone was well, that Zhuli was thriving. He said he was writing music, that his Symphony No. 2 was inspired by their journey across China during the war years, the tea houses and blind musicians…He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?
His eyes had filled with tears, perhaps due to the dryness of the high plateau. She and the Translator gazed at him as if at an apparition. To their astonishment he withdrew a book from his bag, The Rain on Mount Ba, a classic novel.
“Zhuli asked me to give this to you, her favourite book.”
Swirl took it in her hands, confused. “But how can Zhuli be reading it already?”
“She’s eleven now,” Sparrow said, as if confused himself. With the rucksack emptied and hanging uselessly in his hand, he looked forlorn. He wanted to keep bringing things out, she thought, as if he could fill the desert with flowers.
The Translator lit cigarettes for each of them, and for a long time they simply sat in contemplative silence, smoking. Swirl tried to see the sky and the dormitories and the camp office though Sparrow’s eyes, but all she could do was glance at him, as if in a dream, and follow the smoke that curled out of his fingers.
“My mother is petitioning to have your conviction overturned,” he said. “She’s applied for permission to visit you and should be able to come within the month. Ba Lute says you mustn’t go back to Bingpai, you’ll live with us in Shanghai. Zhuli is such a gifted violinist, she never stops practising, the Conservatory will do anything to keep her.”
“But Sparrow…”
“My parents are still looking for Uncle Wen. I feel certain we’ll have news of him soon.”
“Sparrow,” Swirl said, taking his hand for the first time. She steadied her voice. “You must tell Big Mother that, when you found me, my only sadness was missing my family, my husband, my daughter. Nothing else. No suffering. You must thank them for me. You must tell Zhuli my life is good, the Party is re-educating me and I’ll succeed in correcting my mistakes. Make sure she thinks only of her future. She must not be troubled.”
“Of course, aunt.”
Sparrow suddenly remembered something in his pocket. He took out a photograph of Zhuli with her violin, and gave it to her. She had not seen her daughter’s face in more than four years. She stared at the image, as if into an unknown world.
Why do I weep, she thought, trembling. I should be overjoyed. Her daughter had seemed forever lost to her, and yet here she was, so near and close at hand. Perhaps her husband existed like her, still accused of being a traitor and an enemy, and yet their destinies had merged a long time ago.
That afternoon, at the camp office, Swirl waited in the doorway, sheltered from the scorching sun, with Sparrow. The oil truck arrived, her nephew climbed up into the back and, as if it had always been so easy, he left Farm 835. He held firmly to one of the oil drums, gazing back as the distance between them grew, and she knew there was something he wished to say but couldn’t. She tried to imagine his departure: the camp office diminishing in size, and then other buildings that would arrive and also vanish, until Sparrow came to the rail line, the endless trains and faces in the windows. Daylight drained into the ground. She knew that, one day soon, without warning, the conviction against her would be overturned. Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labour, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep? Would she feel joy? She should feel grateful for the chance to return to life. Yet even as Swirl imagined Shanghai, she feared that only the wide open desert and the sky seemed to know her, that it would sharpen and forever expand.
ALL THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER Ai-ming and Ma drove away, I sat at the window reading Ma’s copy of David Copperfield. Again and again, I returned to the opening lines: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Around seven at night, Ma finally came home. I watched her walk across the inner courtyard and ascend the stairs, moving slowly as if the stairs grew invisibly steeper. Her green coat, delicate as a summer leaf, was so familiar to me, she’d had it since before I was born. I watched it rise through the stairwell, as if against the flow of time. Seeing me through the glass, she smiled and began to move faster. She was carrying a parcel in her hands, a small, white bakery box.
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