I ran to the door and opened it, pulling Ma inside.
I had prepared a meal of rice, cucumbers and hardboiled eggs; as we ate, Ma filled the silence by describing, in detail, how the day had unfolded. The border guard, yawning, had waved them through. On the outskirts of Seattle, they’d run into morning traffic. They’d stopped for hamburgers. Ai-ming had bought my favourite sponge cake, and sent it home with Ma in the white bakery box. Ma had waited until Ai-ming boarded the Greyhound, she’d watched the bus pull away and disappear.
After dinner, Ma telephoned Shanghai, speaking for over an hour with Ai-ming’s mother. I sat beside her on the sofa, near enough that her voice covered me.
In bed that night, I concentrated with all my strength, hoping I could hear my father’s voice if only I listened hard enough. Light and shadow slid across the ceiling, now here, now gone, and as I thought about the reasons Ba had left this world, sadness overwhelmed me. Yet the wind sounded against the windows and in the next room, Ma still breathed and changed and dreamed. I wanted to go to her, I wanted to find a way to protect her. Ai-ming had left me a letter which I picked up again:
“We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world / That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds joined wingtip to wingtip / And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree. / Earth endures, heaven endures, even though both shall end.”
Ai-ming was the link between us, my father and hers, my mother and me. Until we knew she was safe, how could we possibly let her go? At that time, I thought I never would.
“In the fall of 1965,” I told the windows, the room, the photograph of my father on the desk, “on the night before Sparrow’s twenty-fourth birthday, a young man, wearing an overcoat far too big for his skinny body, arrived in the night.”
THE HOUSEHOLD–BA LUTE, Big Mother and the two boys, Zhuli and Swirl (newly released, within days of her friend, the Translator)–was fast asleep, but Sparrow was still writing. Outside, a shadow appeared in the laneway. As Sparrow worked on his Symphony No. 3, he could hear the scratching of their steps, back and forth, around and back. The noise crept into his music: a low bassoon interfering with the bass line, now here, now gone.
Irritated, Sparrow set down his pencil. He picked up the lamp, descended the stairs and exited into the courtyard, listening: no sound at all. He flung open the back gate.
The stranger cried out, making them both fall sideways.
Embarrassed, Sparrow shook the lamp. “Speak, Comrade!” he said, as gruffly as he could. “How can I assist you!”
At first, only the wind replied. And then the stranger said, his voice no louder than a sigh, “I’m looking for Young Sparrow.”
He was very slight, very short and surely no one to be afraid of, but still the lamp in Sparrow’s hand trembled. “Young Sparrow? What do you want with him?”
In the stranger’s hand, a crumpled envelope appeared. Even in the low light, Sparrow knew the handwriting immediately. It was the very same calligraphy he had gazed at ever since he was a teenager: square yet full of ardour, telling the story of Da-wei and May Fourth. The stranger shivered miserably and yanked his hand back. He was nervous, but not in the smug, twitchy way of a spy or a jailer. Rather, the young man seemed horrified by the width of the alleyway.
“I am he. That is, I’m Sparrow. What do you need, Comrade?”
The stranger shook his head.
“Is that a letter for me?”
“I have what you would call…news.”
“Quickly, come inside.” The stranger shook his head. Sparrow had to prevent himself from dragging him bodily into the house. “Have you eaten yet? Come. No one will harm you.”
The young man glanced past him. The shadows were not kind to him; everything about him was meagre and crushed. “I will not come in,” he said softly, as if counselling himself. “No, no. I will not! Absolutely, definitely not.”
Sparrow reached into his pocket. Last night, an official in the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had paid him twenty yuan for private lessons–the official wanted to learn Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata–and the large bills were still on him. “Comrade, if you cannot stay and join me for a meal, please accept this small, inconsequential gift.” He had intended to pull out just one bill, but all four came out.
The young man blinked, stunned.
Sparrow hesitated. Then, firmly, as a father might, he took the letter from the stranger’s hands and put the money there instead. Now that it was leaving him, Sparrow felt a pang of confusion and remorse; he did not have another fen in his pocket. Still, he held the young man’s gaze. “Accept the money or come inside.”
The stranger opened his hand and stared at the miraculous bills. “I would not take anything from the family of Brother Wen,” he whispered. “But my circumstances…well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He looked at Sparrow directly, and it was clear that the stranger was no more than eleven or twelve years old. A child.
And then the boy, his destitution and Sparrow’s money vanished down the laneway. Except for the envelope in Sparrow’s hands, it was as if the child had never been.
He shut the door and retraced his steps through the inner courtyard. Upstairs, from the balcony, he looked out in the direction the boy had run. Dawn had begun to crease the sky, and already the ration line on Beijing Road was forming, growing longer by the moment, but the child was long gone.
The envelope was addressed, not to his parents, not to Aunt Swirl or Zhuli, but to “Young Sparrow.” He crouched down with the lamp, opened the envelope, slid out the single sheet of paper and began to read.
—
At dawn, Zhuli came out onto the balcony. She called down to Mrs. Ma who was waiting her turn at the water spigot, wished her good morning, grinned at Sparrow, took his empty teacup away and returned with it full and steaming. She sat on a broken chair and said, “Love letter?”
He grunted.
“Dear cousin,” she whispered, “Happy birthday! May this be the year your thrilling Symphony no. 3 is performed in the concert hall before Chairman Mao himself and our devoted Premier Zhou Enlai! Before President He Luting and all the grand musicians of the Shanghai Conservatory! May the bouquets at your feet be fragrant and plentiful, and may the soloist of your next piano concerto be a certain elegant boy from Changsha–”
“Zhuli, if you don’t hurry, that boy from Changsha will have reserved the best practice room. You’ll have to play your violin in the street.”
“You’re right! Jiang Kai practises more than anyone in the Conservatory. Except me. But you know,” she said, her voice dropping even lower, “the piano in Room 103 is ancient and all the pianists avoid it. For a violinist, there’s so much space it’s practically a villa.” She shoved him on the knee. “But, really, who is the letter from?”
He had turned the envelope over before she recognized her father’s handwriting. “Premier Zhou Enlai, inviting me to perform at his grand reception where–”
“The envelope is too plain.”
“Herr Bach, asking me to–”
“The envelope is too new.”
“The neighbourhood grandma, asking why I compose for the degenerate piano rather than the glorious guqin.”
She nodded. “I see. Cousin,” she said, after a moment, “this morning I found the bag of dried peas that went missing. They were in the sleeve of my mother’s coat.”
“What did you do?”
“I left them there! She thinks she’s such a skilful thief!”
“She’s an excellent thief, only there’s nowhere to hide anything.”
“The other day,” Zhuli continued, “I tried to throw out a sock that had eight holes in it but Ma fished it out of the garbage, washed it, mended it and put it back in my drawer. It’s like wearing a fishing net. I’ve been mending it for the last three years! She goes through the trash looking for things, she actually…Last night, she wrapped the quilt twice around herself, even though it was boiling hot. And then sh
e asked me to sleep very close and keep the draft away. I tried to do what she wanted, but there was no draft! Still she shook and shivered!”
His cousin was a joyful and free creature, she seemed to have no relation to any of them. “Aunt Swirl went to the end of the world and came back. Give her time.”
“Speaking of time!” She leaped up, grabbing her violin case. “I’ll come to your office at noon! Let me treat you to a birthday lunch.”
Sparrow slipped the envelope away so that he was nearly sitting on it. “Cousin, about the Ravel. Your technique is excellent of course, but yesterday the phrasing sounded pinched to me, especially the pizzicato. It’s a matter of finding the simple in the complex, rather than the complex in the complex, do you understand what I mean? Work on the bowing today, won’t you?”
“My serious Sparrow, what would I do without you? Come to Room 103 at lunchtime, and I’ll make Ravel himself proud.”
—
Alone once more, Sparrow picked up the envelope again. It was true, there was nowhere to hide anything in this house, or even this neighbourhood, not even a bag of peas or a guilty thought. He reread Wen the Dreamer’s letter, then he took the box of matches from the window ledge, held the letter over the cigarette tin and set it alight. Wen’s handwriting became distorted and round, long and thin, until every sentence was the same: nothing but residue. But Sparrow remembered every word as if the brief letter was a poem or Bach partita. He could stand up and deliver it now, word for word, note for note.
—
All morning, the words floated through Sparrow’s thoughts and would not leave him, even when Flying Bear dropped his breakfast on the floor and Da Shan walked barefoot into porcelain shards. The letter continued even as Sparrow washed blood, pottery and breakfast out of Da Shan’s foot.
“Should we go to the clinic? Probably I need stitches?”
“I don’t think so. Antiseptic should do.”
“Of course.” His voice a disappointed trombone.
Meanwhile, Swirl cleaned the floor, Ba Lute dished out another bowl of food, his mother yelled at everyone, and Flying Bear pretended to spear his brother in the back.
The letter sat in his mind and brought unexpected tears to Sparrow’s eyes.
Da Shan leaned forward, wiped the tears away with his delicate fingers and said nothing.
My dear friend, I trust this letter finds you well and that you remember me, your dreaming friend who treasures you like his own son. Today I am neither in the east nor the west. One day I will tell you all the vagaries, cliff-hangers and digressions of the story. But, in short: I escaped from H–camp and have gone into hiding. I cannot describe conditions to you, little bird. The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes. For the last month, I have been searching for a safe house. Last week, fate brought me to Shanghai and I saw my family. They did not see me and I did not dare make myself known. The authorities closed in and I left the city headed for G–Province. Little bird, please do all you can to prevent my family from searching for me. I must close this letter. A book could not hold all I wish to say.
Your friend,
Comrade “Bach”
P.S. I have found a further chapter of our Book of Records.
It came into my hands in the most unlikely of places, after my transfer from J–.
P.P.S. If ever the chance presents itself, seek out Comrade Glass Eye in the Village of Cats and do present a copy of the Book of Records to him. He was my companion at J–and his preferred composer is Schönberg. Tell him you are well acquainted with his childhood friends, the adventurer, Da-wei, and the fearless May Fourth.
Three days passed before officers from the Public Security Bureau showed up at the door. Like the destitute stranger, the officers came early in the morning, before breakfast was even on the table. Unlike him, they banged on the laneway gate and bullied their way in. They said that the “counter-revolutionary, criminal, rightist, political pollutant”…and here they had to pause and search through their papers…“Comrade Wen!”…had escaped, critically injuring two army officers. They accused Ba Lute of harbouring an enemy of the state.
Ba Lute listened calmly, but when the two officers announced that Swirl and Zhuli must come immediately for questioning, he leaped forward, flinging down the draft of Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3 that happened to be in his hands. “How dare you shame me in my own house!” he shouted. He began rampaging through the rooms. “Come over here! Is Comrade Wen under the bed? Is he in the closet? Did we use his corpse to fuel the stove? Check the garbage pail, shit house and laundry bag!” He hurled objects across the room as the security officers, pale and unconditioned, knocked each other down in their haste to escape the careening objects of Ba Lute. Sparrow’s father was taller than ever but only half as round, and therefore twice as intimidating. “Comrade Wen has the aggression of a falling leaf! How did he injure two officers? The way a drop of rain injures the pavement? Who’s selling potatoes here?”
“Uncle–” Zhuli said.
“Have you lost your mind?” Big Mother Knife said calmly.
“I’ve had enough!” Ba Lute shouted. “You’ve wrongly imprisoned his wife! That’s right! Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu! Check the records yourselves, she’s been resurrected! She’s working for the Party now and she’s probably ranked higher than you are! You little shits have stained our Revolution and one day I’m going to haul you before Chen Yi himself and have him whip your balls. Donkeys! Do you have any clue who I am?”
Mrs. Ma was summoned and she sternly informed the officers that she was the head of the residential committee, and there were absolutely no escaped rightists in her jurisdiction. The very thought, she murmured, was appalling. Everyone here had their papers and household registration in order, they could be sure of that. She tossed her sleek head and offered to escort the officers outside.
Beside the door, Sparrow said nothing. The pages of his symphony, flung aside by Ba Lute, had shoe prints on them. He went to gather them up.
Only when the officers were gone did Swirl turn to Big Mother. “Did they say that Wen escaped?”
“Yes,” she said. Her better eye moistened and she turned away to gauge the destruction that had befallen her house.
“But how?” Swirl said, sitting down. “Where could he go?”
Ba Lute blustered back into the room, yelling, “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what have I done?” Sparrow hustled his younger brothers into the kitchen, distracting them with little sugar pyramids and a quick game of Watching the Tiger, and then he went to the balcony and peered into the can that held the ashes of Wen the Dreamer’s letter. There were a dozen ends of cigarettes, a thick wad of tobacco but not a trace of the page, the writing or the words. Sparrow looked over the railing. In the laneway, the two officers were deep in agitated conversation. Mrs. Ma was firmly shaking her head. Waste water from the gutter circled their feet.
The letter had disappeared for good, Sparrow thought. It had dissolved into the air itself, escaped to where no officer, spy or committee chairman could ever retrieve it. At the first opportunity, when no one else was around, he would tell Aunt Swirl what Wen the Dreamer had written.
—
Sparrow left with Zhuli, his cousin clutching her violin case in both arms, walking with one foot narrowly in front of the other as if she regretted every inch of space she inhabited. Against the grey-blue wave of oncoming pedestrians, Sparrow wanted to clear a path for her and so he walked with his chest out and his slender arms swinging, deluding himself that he was a tank and not a paper boat. But nobody, not even schoolchildren, moved aside for him. Bicycles whizzed so close their handlebars clipped his elbows. How unlike Ba Lute he was. Given his father’s heft, Sparrow felt soft, flimsy and inessential.
The tram arrived. Zhuli turned and smiled distractedly back at hi
m before the rippling blue of her dress disappeared among the other passengers. They did not meet up again until the gates of the Conservatory, where she called down to him from above. Zhuli was balanced gracefully on a concrete ledge, one hand hooked around the iron fence, the rest of her body tipped to the side. Her hair, gathered into a long braid, sat on her shoulder and the ends seemed alive in the breeze. Inside the gates, the pianist Yin Chai, the brightest star of the Conservatory and admittedly appealing in army-style shirt and trousers, was sitting on a bench. He had returned from Moscow after taking second place in the Tchaikovsky competition and everywhere he went, or so it seemed to Sparrow, a flood of stage lights followed him.
“What do you think, cousin?” Zhuli said, making a soft landing beside him.
The chatter of the students drummed at him like a headache. He smiled to hide his envy and fell back on a cliché, “ ‘Can the sparrow and swallow know the will of the great swan?’ Yin Chai is a national treasure.”
“I prefer your compositions to his melodrama.”
“Do you?” Sparrow said, unable to believe it. Yet when his cousin played his work, it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.
He told Zhuli he would come find her in Room 103, her preferred practice room, and then dodged the crowd and climbed the imposing staircase. On the ground floor, all five hundred of the Conservatory’s pianos seemed to be singing and feuding together. He skirted Room 204 with its gongs and cymbals, 313 with its many-stringed zithers, and the violin-making workshops of 320. On the fourth floor, he glanced past an open door and saw the President of the Conservatory, He Luting, deep in conversation with a cadre Sparrow didn’t recognize. “That’s your decision,” He Luting was saying, “but exactly what constitutes a crime these days?” President He was famously blunt. Occasionally he invited Sparrow to his home to drink lemonade, listen to records and read over his compositions. The whole Conservatory knew that, when He Luting was a child, his elder brother had owned a French music text, and the book so enthralled Comrade He that, at night, he would sneak downstairs and copy it out by hand. Fascinated by the construction of Western music, he taught himself staff notation. When he finally became a Conservatory student in the 1920s, he was famous for falling out of bed with his hands still moving in the air. Sparrow longed to know what He Luting had been playing in his dreams. Had he been performing or composing? Had he been dreaming of his teacher, Huang Zi, who had himself studied under Paul Hindemith? Could dreams shed light on the architecture of the music in his head? Sparrow, too, dreamed all the time of things he had not written. Each morning when he woke, he heard these pieces like a vanishing noise in the street, and he wanted to weep over the music he had lost.
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