“Later on, he rarely spoke his wife’s name. Instead, he occupied himself by telling a story that had no beginning and no end, and that was born of the Revolution. One of the characters, May Fourth, reminded me very much of my own mother. May Fourth leaves her life and disappears into the wilderness; meanwhile, Da-wei searches for his family across the ocean and the desert. Wen could divide their lives into pieces and distribute them over a hundred days or over a thousand.
“One day, I recognized myself in the story: there was suddenly a young man who made glass eyes for a living and felt most at ease, most himself, among the partially sighted and the blind. I also began to recognize the lives of our fellow inmates in Jiabangou. I heard the echo of their star-crossed loves and youthful dreams. In the end, I never knew how much Wen the Dreamer made up, or how much was part of the original book he had memorized. Perhaps no one knows but the author himself; even Wen has lost track of where he begins and where the story joins him. He has become far more than a skilled calligrapher.
“The Year of the Rat arrived. It was 1960. Strings were pulled by a childhood friend of my mother who had heard of my case and worked discreetly to have me freed. I was unexpectedly resurrected. I was literally brought back to life because, in a few months’ time, there would be almost no ‘rightists’ left. Professors, thinkers and scientists, leaders who had taken part in the Long March, grandfathers who had spilled blood for the Party, good men, weak men, honest and conniving men, bachelor men and men with a dozen desperate children: they were no more. Our great Communist community turned away as these human beings were ground to dust.
“I had to leave, even if it meant breaking my promise and abandoning Wen. The last time I saw him, your uncle told me that he had made a plan of escape. I actually laughed. Getting out was impossible. He might as well have made a plan to turn Mao Zedong into Charlie Chaplin. I told him his ragged clothes weighed more than he did. Worse, there was nowhere to go. The Party guarded the train station as if it were a storehouse of gold.
“ ‘But I am not gold,’ he said.
“ ‘Then what are you, my friend?’
“ ‘Just a copy of a copy. A migrating soul.’
“He was mad, I thought, and soon would leave this world. This was the only escape open to him. I hid my grief and I said to him, ‘One day the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Jiabangou will be common knowledge, the way the Boxer Rebellion and the Long March are written into our books and our memories. My brother, we will not be abandoned by history.’
“Wen said to me, ‘That will not happen in our lifetimes, nor the lifetime of this stone beneath my foot.’ Then he looked down at the ground on which there were no visible stones, only dry grass and splintered branches. Who was right? It’s too soon to say.
“There was no one around us, there was not even a breeze. There was no one to overhear me but I had gotten into the habit of whispering. But what could I say that was honest and true? What had I learned in these three terrible years? Did I know more about living or dying? ‘Wen,’ I said, ‘this country exists in fear. I am a rationalist and a scientific man. I believe the rules of life become ever more intricate, there are unseen wires from each to each that we cannot see, not yet. We are here to learn and not to forget, here to question and not to answer. You are a man of questions. Of all the destinies of the world, this is a heroic one, and yet it carries suffering for it is hard to live with so little certainty. Why were we sent here to Jiabangou? Whose purpose did it serve? For I believe it must serve some purpose: we are the builders of the Revolution and also its scapegoats.’
“ ‘Escape is the only answer,’ Wen said.
“ ‘Escape is death.’
“Wen smiled. He had wasted away. If he lay down to rest his head, I feared he might never rise again. He said, ‘I would never walk knowingly to my death.’
“He showed me his suitcase. Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts. What new movement could the Party proclaim that would bring these dead souls into line? What crackdown could erase something that was hidden in plain sight?
“ ‘This is my fate,’ Wen the Dreamer told me. ‘To escape and continue this story, to make infinite copies, to let these stories permeate the soil, invisible and undeniable.’
“And so he escaped,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “With the suitcase, I am sure, and convinced of his destiny.” He wiped his eyes. “I am glad Wen the Dreamer sent you to me, but I wonder which story he wanted you to hear. You know how it is: pull one thread, and the whole curtain unravels.”
“He wanted me to hear just the story you told,” Sparrow said. “I am sure of it.”
“There is the engineer we called Geiger, and also the former soldier, Paper Gun.” He waved at the air as if the two men were standing beside him. “I was given the name Comrade Glass Eye. Perhaps that is the lesson the Party wanted us to learn: in our basic needs–air, water, food, and shelter–nothing separates the doctor from the flea, the educated from the ignorant. So, in fact, I was re-educated after all. I learned this lesson all too well.”
Across the clear morning, Sparrow could see Kai bringing water to the garden, ladling it out with a small container.
“If you had to guess, where do you think my uncle might have gone?”
“Wen the Dreamer has no identity papers and he has, therefore, little room to manoeuvre.” The old man shook his head. “He is a refugee in his own country. There are two routes that I can see: either the northern journey of May Fourth into the desert, or across the ocean like Da-wei. Which would your uncle choose?”
“Neither. He will not leave my Aunt Swirl or Zhuli.”
“Agreed. Regardless of his trajectory, you will hear from him.”
“Yes,” Sparrow said. “He can’t prevent himself from putting pen to paper.”
The old man laughed. He seemed to emit light for a moment and then the light wavered and dimmed.
“Come,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “I think your friend has recovered from last night’s festivities. He is ready to continue playing music for us and I’m ready to rest my feet and close my eyes, bend my head, and listen attentively. I remember now that Wen the Dreamer always began his stories with the greeting, ‘Kàn guān. Dear listener.’ ”
—
That same day, while practising Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Zhuli could not stop thinking about her parents. Had Swirl and Big Mother Knife reached Gansu Province? What was the probability that her father would come across an altered copy of the Book of Records? It was as likely, Zhuli thought, as her being invited to play Prokofiev before Chairman Mao and the villagers of Bingpai.
She had been just a child then, only six years old, when she discovered the underground library. Sitting alone, frozen by the winter sun, she had seen a stranger emerging from the soil. His head had seemed to lift from the ground as if he were crawling out of his own grave. The stranger turned north, his long, baggy body melting into the trees. Zhuli had stood, peering after him. Was he an escaped convict or just a stranger passing through? Maybe it was the ghost of her great-grandfather, Old West.
Zhuli went to investigate. After the land reform had been achieved, after they had been assigned the mud brick house, Zhuli had been expelled from the village school. The child of a disgraced landlord, the peasants’ association decided, should study the textbook of the fields and the equations of the sky. Besides, she already knew how to read and should no longer take up precious space. With nowhere to go and no one to play with, Zhuli had tried to stay with her parents in the fields, but she got in the way of the plough and cut her feet on the sharp
rice stalks. Her mother, exasperated, yelled at her to go home. She obeyed but inside the hut, the loneliness became unbearable.
Zhuli decided to investigate the spot where the old man had emerged. Crouching in the shade of a gnarled tree, she saw a clean, dark stone and, beneath it, flattened grass and a branch worn smooth: it was a handle. She lifted the trap door. There was a rope with knots. She was small and, even in her bulky, padded coat, climbed down easily.
In some ways, this hidden space was more comfortable than the bare room in which she lived with her parents. It was just below ground, as if a very large and well-made wooden box, a shipping container, had been buried with a living room inside it, like an afterlife for Old West. There was a cushioned chair large enough for six Zhulis, an imported kerosene lamp and a full case of oil, stacks and stacks of books, and a soft, woven mat on the floor. She lit one of the lamps and, pulling shut the trap door, glimpsed two musical instruments, a qin and an erhu, though she hadn’t known their names at the time. When she set it on her lap, the qin was heavy and cold. It had a creaking roughness and, at first, she simply sat with it and stared at the room which, in comparison to the mud house, seemed modern and strange. The crumbling books were from another age, they were literally from another continent, but the heavy qin felt alive. On her lap it seemed to breathe in and out, like the great-grandfather to whom it must have belonged.
Zhuli went down almost every day, even if only for an hour. Over an entire season, she tested the range of the qin’s five, battered strings. She did not know how to tune the instrument but quickly settled on a harmony that seemed to suit both the strings and herself. Later on, she learned that the classical guqin was associated with elderly scholars and erudite books (“With snakes, conservatives and reactionaries,” her classmates said) and it was true, Old West’s qin had made her feel part of a floating darkness. The sounds it made were otherworldly, and had more in common with punctuation than with words. At night, Zhuli slept curled up beside her mother, longing to be in the underground library. She needed to make sure the instrument was still breathing. Truly, it felt as if the old qin was her stronger, braver twin.
Spring was late that year and all the farmers and the hungry people were anxiously watching the ground. An otherwise kind boy named Lu saw her emerge from the soil, just as she had glimpsed the old man. That very day, the container was dug up and all the objects carted off. The books, the soft carpets and the cushioned chair were confiscated, proof that Old West’s descendants were biding their time and continued to conceal their wealth. Neighbours whom Zhuli knew, who always greeted her on the paths and sometimes gave her something small to eat, came and plastered the mud brick house with hastily written denunciations, the words so large they could be read from the road. She knew only a handful of characters, but she recognized the ones for girl/daughter 女 and sky 天, which had been linked together to form a single word, witch 妖 (yāo).
That evening, the little hut was very quiet. Zhuli asked her mother why the word yāo was written on their house. Her mother combed Zhuli’s hair and said it was nothing, a small disagreement with the neighbours and, anyway, what an odd word to recognize. Swirl did something she never did, she mixed a paste of herbs and eucalyptus oil and rubbed the mixture over Zhuli’s arms and legs, gently massaging her arms, legs, feet, fingers and even her toes. With every circular motion of her mother’s fingers, Zhuli disappeared piece by piece. She remembered the soothing warmth of the kang and her father’s suitcase with its dulled fabric and brass clasps, and a keyhole the size of her pinky. Once she had asked for the key but he said it didn’t exist.
Night fell. Into the silence a true demon came. It shouted and raged as if to topple the hut. All at once there were people everywhere, some holding ropes and even singing, then hands shoving her aside as she tried to reach her mother, who had been forced to her knees. Swirl was saying, “Pity…pity.” There was a loud clap and her mother cried out. Wen the Dreamer’s voice shook as if it was coming from the foundations of the little house itself. Zhuli cried and cried. Was it her screaming that frightened all the demons away? She imagined she was the daughter and sky twisted up, demonic, and all the neighbours were afraid of her now. The men left, half carrying, half dragging her parents with them, as if they, too, were objects retrieved from underground. And then the room, in shambles, was silent. She climbed up onto the kang even though its warmth had dulled. She was afraid to feed coal into its mouth and heat the bed again, so she pulled all the quilts around herself, lay down and closed her eyes. She asked herself how the underground room could harm anyone, and why knowing of its existence was enough to bring forth demons. No answers came to her. Events were like dreams, she concluded, and thus could not be real. When she awoke from this dream, she told herself, the bed would be warm and her parents would be here and it would be morning. This time she would be very careful when she climbed into Old West’s buried library, she would smuggle the qin out and hide it here. Was it still breathing? A day passed and then another. There was nothing to eat but she stole a few leaves from the young plants in the communal garden, and her dreams grew lengthy and warm and elastic. Was it then that she saw the excavation and the hole in the ground? Perhaps other events occurred as well but she no longer recalled them. She drummed her fingers on the cold bed and hummed to herself, and the music comforted her.
—
When she woke after the third night, a young woman was sitting in her father’s chair with a bag of White Rabbit sweets in her lap. Zhuli stared at the woman but could not remember who she was. Nevertheless, she said politely, “Good morning, older sister.”
“Pack your things,” the woman said firmly. Her words were oddly accented because the candy had made her teeth sticky. Zhuli took the five objects that were nearest to her, which included a dress, a washcloth, and two of her father’s records.
They walked under the village gates and towards the next town. Zhuli knew she had been to town before but she could not remember why. Nothing looked familiar. They came to a roundabout with a half-dozen soot-covered minibuses. The White Rabbit muttered that her parents were lucky not to have their heads chopped off, they were fortunate that the worst excesses were a thing of the past. “They’ve been sent for re-education, that’s all,” she said. “Since you’ve never been educated at all, it seemed pointless to send you along with them.”
Inside the bus, the rim of the windowsill overflowed with the husks of sunflower seeds. Every time Zhuli moved, the plastic bag with her belongings crackled like a witch laughing.
The countryside appeared to be breaking up into a rubble of shapes, tilting huts, splattered concrete and blocks of ash. People appeared from every road, moving and running to keep up with something she couldn’t see. The White Rabbit talked a lot but her voice seemed to pass over Zhuli’s head and out the window. She looked down at her feet and saw that her cloth shoes were muddy and that she had violet bruise on her left knee. The more she stared at it, the bluer and deeper it seemed to grow. She must have fallen asleep because when she woke there was a big moon outside the bus, and also a patter of electric lights, but everything else was darkness. The bus seemed to turn around in many circles before finally stopping and everyone suddenly leaped into action, pulling down bags and birds and chickens. A dog ran onto the bus and people ran off. The woman smelled of the sweets she had been eating all evening. They walked. There were many people on the sidewalks and Zhuli’s bag scratched against their legs. The White Rabbit is taking me to my mother, she thought. Zhuli quickened her steps and, as the woman hurried along, too, Zhuli feared that she might snap, lift with happiness and break apart as soon as her mother took her in her arms. The bag cackled and snickered beside her, To my mother, to my mother! To Ma, to Ma!
They came to an archway, a lane and then an alleyway. She followed the woman along the rows of doors, so similar they all seemed to be children of one another. The White Rabbit chose one and stopped. “These are your relatives. Knock here and ask for y
our aunt.” The lady knelt down and gave her one last candy and an envelope with red letterhead. She touched Zhuli’s knee and the big, round bruise, which Zhuli had forgotten about, shot pain up her leg all the way to her eyes. “Good luck, Zhuli,” the woman said and then she, too, disappeared. Zhuli faced the door, listening to the echoing sound of the woman’s footsteps. She waited for the pain in her knee to subside, and she slipped the candy into the envelope. After waiting what seemed a long time, she lifted her hand and knocked.
The eerie creaking of the door made her shiver. A teenaged boy appeared. He had uncombed hair and nice eyebrows.
“I’m looking for my aunt,” Zhuli cried.
His eyebrows lifted. He saw the two records angling out of her plastic bag.
“Bā Hè,” she said. Bach. The teenager’s eyes and the door opened wider. “You should tell my aunt that I am here,” she said firmly. She shoved the paper with red letterhead against his stomach.
Late that night, she woke up, alert, and saw moonlight on her exposed feet. There were monsters beside her on the bed–her cousins, she later learned, Flying Bear and Da Shan. She crawled away from them and out of the room, towards a light waving at her in the distance. To mother, to mother. Zhuli was pulled forward until she reached that room. Two candles were lit and their fire swayed like unsteady feet. She saw Sparrow’s teacup first, and then his hand, and then his arm connected to his shoulder, and so on, until she reached his eyes. He was not surprised to see her.
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