There was someone watching her. The haze in the air and her own distraction had made her careless, and she had not noticed this other person. He stood up now and came towards her. Zhuli finally recognized him. Tofu Liu, her classmates called him mockingly. He was a soft-hearted, soft-spoken violinist. He was almost camouflaged; both his trousers and shirt were the same shade of army green.
“Long live Chairman Mao,” he said, “and long live our glorious Revolution!”
“Long may it flourish. Long live the great Communist Party of China.”
“Comrade Zhuli,” he said. “I didn’t mean to follow you. Actually, as it happens, I wanted to ask you…it’s nothing really. So.” He remained standing, as if hoping some campaign would sweep him away. When it didn’t, he shifted his violin case to the other hand and continued. “Well, Professor Tan says that Tzigane is one of the most impossible pieces to learn, yet you play it effortlessly.” The smile that touched his lips was swift and sad. “There’s a Prokofiev for two violins I’m eager to learn and Professor Tan had an idea that you…Of course you have your own concert to prepare for. I believe this piece might suit you perfectly. Really, it isn’t boring at all. The Prokofiev for two violins, I mean. Not boring. Say yes only if this would interest you. Or if it might please you…Well, do you want to?”
How would he survive? Zhuli wondered. He was as firm as a beaten egg. “I like Prokofiev.”
Liu smiled. His eyes were too bright, too kind. “I’ll copy the score and bring it for you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. To her own surprise, she asked him, “Little Liu, what is happening now? What is happening to us?”
He hadn’t moved but it felt as if he had taken a step closer to her. “It’s what happens to every generation.”
She didn’t understand. The very trees seemed to bend and hold them.
“Don’t you recognize it, Zhuli?” he asked. “I think history is not so different from music, all the different eras, like when the Baroque ended and Classical began, when one kind of understanding transformed into another…Our parents used to blame a person’s suffering on destiny, but when traditional beliefs fell away, we began to understand the deeper reasons for society’s inequalities.” He was speaking nervously, as if unwinding a breathless Tchaikovsky descent. “Chairman Mao says we must defend the Revolution by identifying everyone and everything that is counter-revolutionary. We students have so many fights and arguments because we are still developing our political understanding. We’re teaching ourselves to think in an entirely new way, uncorrupted by the old consciousness. But the youth are capable, aren’t they? Truly, I think we are more selfless than the generation before us. My father was a rightist like yours…Maybe we can become…But it is difficult because we must struggle against ourselves, really question our motivations and ask on whose behalf we’re building a more just society.” He was timid but there was no shame in his eyes. “If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how we can talk to one another? We will never find common purpose. I believe in the Party, of course, and I don’t want to lose faith. I will never lose faith…”
“Yes,” Zhuli said. “I agree with you.” Here it was again, welling up inside her, laughter and fear.
“I’ve always known I can speak openly to you, Zhuli. You’re not like the others. We saw what our fathers went through. So…” He looked at her and nodded. “See you tomorrow.”
Liu was already walking backwards, his violin case smashing against his right knee. He turned and his green clothes faded into the sunshine. Zhuli watched him go and felt a painful hammering in her heart. Why did he trust her? Whom should she trust? Her hands had no sensation, as if they were made of wood. But the notes filled her thoughts as if she were still in Room 103, as if her mind had not noticed that her hands no longer moved.
—
Up until the instant he entered Kai’s room, Sparrow had convinced himself he was not going. The meeting, or as Kai called it, the study group, was not meant for someone like him. Yet, for nearly forty minutes, Sparrow pedalled his bicycle east, turning left at Henan Middle Road, right at Haining and finally into a kaleidoscope of smaller streets. He dismounted and walked in circles until he discovered the alleyway and a staircase into the concrete block building.
On the third floor, he knocked at number 32. Kai appeared, windy-haired even though he probably hadn’t left his room. Pleasure flooded his face the moment he saw Sparrow. “I was afraid you wouldn’t find it.” Sparrow smiled as if he, himself, had never doubted.
How small it was, and dark. A radio was placed up against the door, the volume deafening. There were shapes that could be people or could be objects, but no fan and the room was stifling. A young woman, despite moving aside to make room for Sparrow, was still so close that he was submerged in the almond scent of her hair. Someone demanded Sparrow’s ID card, others laughed, and a young man said, “Too puny to stand up to the wind. Definitely not public security.” “Were you followed?” And then a grandmother’s prickly voice: “He probably followed you, San Li.” Laughter. Sparrow was trembling, he could smell his own sweat. “Just relax,” the almond-scented girl said impatiently. “Are you really the great composer that Kai goes on and on about?” Before he could answer, they began talking about a book he hadn’t read: he hadn’t even heard of it. They mentioned a book he did know, Kang Youwei’s Book of the Great Community, but the moment he silently congratulated himself, the conversation rumbled on.
In the corner, Kai had not spoken. He was at least a decade younger than the men and women in this room.
“Old Cat, what did you bring? Where are you?” “In your lap.” This was the grandmother speaking now. “San Li, pay attention to what’s in your lap for once!”
The grandmother reached into a cloth bag and pulled out a small stack of books. “A few odds and ends. Essays in Skepticism–”
“Delightful,” the almond-scented girl, whom they called Ling, purred.
“And Xi Li, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Shen Congwen, and what else…”
Another candle was lit. Ling picked up Xi Li, or Friedrich Schiller, searching for the place they had left off the previous week. Sparrow knew Schiller only as the German writer beloved by Verdi, whose poem Brahms had used in a funeral song:
Even the beautiful must die!
See! The gods weep, all the goddesses weep
Because the beautiful perishes, because perfection dies
Even to be a song of lament on a loved ones’ lips is glorious…
San Li said, “Hurry up, the spy is dozing off!”
“A birch tree, a spruce, a poplar is beautiful,” Ling began, “when it climbs slenderly aloft; an oak, when it grows crooked; the reason is, because the latter, left to itself, loves the crooked, the former, on the contrary, loves the direct course….Which tree will the painter like most to seek out, in order to use it in a landscape? Certainly that one, which makes use of the freedom, that even, with some boldness, ventures something, steps out of order, even if it must here cause a breach, and there disarrange something through its stormy interference.”
She read for thirty, forty minutes, and every word was distinct. When she closed the book, the grandmother asked if she would be willing to take it away and mimeograph a new copy.
“I’m already copying My Education and the department is suspicious. Give it to San Li.”
General merriment followed. “Last time, he stuck all the pages together with syrup–” “Ling found a fishbone, didn’t she?” “Chicken bone.” “I like to leave a little something for you lot.” “It’s the Permanent Revolution of San Li’s dinner.”
When the laughter faded and the Schiller remained unspoken for, Sparrow raised his voice. “I will do it.”
“Well, well,” Ling said. “A bookish spy! Kai was right to be intrigued.”
“Have it ready by next week,” the Old Cat told him over the scattered giggling. “And don’t eat
with it.”
“Take this one, too,” San Li said. “Dmitri Shostakovich. Translated from Russian. It’s too technical for us.”
Sparrow accepted.
In the darkness, the radio announcer was repeating familiar words, Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a group of counter-revolutionary revisionists…
—
Bowls of peanuts and a jug of rice wine were passed from hand to hand. The older gentleman proposed a toast to “Lakes of wine and forests of meat!” and when everyone raised their cups, the lone candle went out. Ling started humming a song he couldn’t place.
“My boy,” the older man said, turning to Kai, “it’s been weeks since I saw you. The piano in my house grows dusty, and Ling says you never visit anymore.”
“Why, I saw her yesterday,” Kai said laughing, “but I’ll come tomorrow, Professor.”
The wine had permeated all of Sparrow’s limbs, and the Professor appeared round as a floating balloon as he scooted over. Some of them we have already seen through, the radio shouted, others we have not! Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors…
Tipsily, the Professor turned to Sparrow. “I’ve heard so much about you, Comrade. If I may say so, your String Octet is one of my favourite pieces of music. Such an honour to finally make your acquaintance.” Around them, conversation was breaking into smaller pieces. The Professor hummed a song, “Jasmine,” that took Sparrow back to the teahouses of his youth. Sparrow confided that he had travelled the length of the country singing that very song.
“In my youth,” the Professor said, “I, too, travelled. I was conscripted by the Kuomintang. Fortunately, I managed to slip away and cross over to the Communist army. It was horror. The fighting, I mean. But we made this country.” He paused, thumped his knee twice softly and said, “Afterwards, I arrived at the victory celebration in my hometown, only to be told…when the Japanese entered the town, my wife disappeared. I said to myself, many people were displaced during the aggression. If the gods are watching, I’ll surely find her again.” The Professor had gone to Shanghai to teach history and Western philosophy at Jiaotong University. “Our books are full of stories of mistaken identity, star-crossed love, years of separation. Do you know the classic song, ‘The Faraway Place,’ well, you must, of course. I can’t hear it without thinking that my beloved has finally returned. It’s been twenty years since I last saw her, but in my mind she’s the same.”
“Tell him how I came to live with you,” Kai said. His voice was soft. In the darkness, it was unexpectedly near.
“Ah,” the Professor said. “Well, in 1960, I learned that my wife’s nephew had a gift for music. I arranged admission for him to the preparatory school of the Shanghai Conservatory–”
“You moved heaven and earth,” Kai said.
“Well. I had fought bravely in the war. As I said, people bent their ears to me back then. In any case, that is how Jiang Kai arrived in Shanghai. He was eleven years old, it was just after the Three Years of Catastrophe…I tell you, this was my first indication of the disaster that was happening there. We had shortages in Shanghai, of course, but nothing like the countryside…” The Professor motioned towards the window. “Kai came to live with me and, in my home, there was suddenly music. I was tutoring Ling at the time, and he used to follow her everywhere she went. They were inseparable.”
He took the erhu and held it as if the instrument could answer a confusion in his mind. The old Professor played the opening notes of “The Faraway Place,” then smiled regretfully at Sparrow. He set the bow down.
In the room, conversation had turned inward. Ling was saying, “But who loves the Revolution more than we do? Who would die for it? I would. So why can’t I criticize policies and still be considered a reformer within the Party? Why does the Party persist in believing that criticism only comes from class enemies?”
“But the cultural revolution, the new campaign, is about questioning the old ways of doing things,” Kai said. “Renewing ourselves–”
San Li was peremptory. “Don’t be naive. It’s criticism along acceptable and correct lines–”
Ling intervened. “Every work unit has to turn over a set percentage of rightists, but that’s crazy, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s genius. Either way, it’s entirely systematic.”
The talk murmured on, never finding a way through or an idea they could all agree on.
Loosened by the wine, Sparrow’s thoughts drifted. Underneath the radio and the voices, he felt concealed, as if he really were a spy. Tomorrow he would arrive at his office at the Conservatory and continue his symphony. The four white walls, the plain desk and open space in his mind, could so spare a life be called freedom? He had been listening to Bach again. How had this composer from the West turned away from the linear and found his voice in the cyclical, in canons and fugues, in what Bach referred to as God’s time and in what the ancient Song and Tang scholars saw as the continual reiterations of the past, the turning of the wheel of history? Campaigns, revolutions themselves, arrived in waves, ending only to start again. Could Bach’s limitations create another kind of freedom? Could an absence of freedom reveal the borders of their lives, their mortality, their fate? What if life and fate turned out to be the same thing? He shook the thought away. The wine was making him soft. He would have to stand up soon, find his bicycle and pedal home, and it would be up to his feet and legs to turn in circles. This room, he told himself, was an anomaly, perhaps one of many: corners of the city that had not yet been polished smooth. Zhuli would have understood, instinctively, what troubled him, she would have seen how the Professor and his friends were willing to leave their allotted space and march to the centre of the stage. But all Sparrow wanted was time to sit in his room and write, he wanted to set down this music that came, unstoppable, unending, from his thoughts.
The Old Cat picked up the remaining book, opened it almost halfway and began to read grumpily. Her voice reminded him, with a pang, of his mother. The story was familiar to Sparrow even though he had never encountered this book before.
She read, “Grandfather smiled sympathetically, but did not tell Cuicui what had gone on the night before. He thought to himself: ‘If only you could dream on forever. Some people become the prime minister in their dreams.’ ”
—
The glasses were emptied and the books packed away. So as not to attract attention, they left at intervals: the Old Cat and Ling, followed by San Li, Sparrow and finally the Professor. Kai, who was leaning against the wall by the door, touched Sparrow’s arm lightly as he passed through. In the hallway, Sparrow stood listening, but instead of the Professor or Kai, all he heard was the belligerent clamouring of the radio, of all the radios in the building. The entire city, he realized, would soon be deaf, and that would be the end of his musical career.
He wished that a week had already passed, and that he was, at this very moment, returning up the concrete stairs to Kai’s room. If only he were just now lifting his hand to knock, waiting to be allowed inside. Instead of leaving he might, at this moment, be arriving.
—
Early the next morning, when Zhuli entered Room 103, Tzigane became the only Shanghai. Hours later, she emerged humbled and electrified. The sky was blue-grey as if it had swallowed all the Mao coats in the city. She heard Ravel (Tzigane), Prokofiev (Sonata for Solo Violin No. 4) and Bach (Partita for Solo Violin No. 2), each on a separate channel as if she were standing between three concert halls. On Julu Road, cyclists seemed to branch out from the music itself; they disappeared in the fog of July sunshine. She walked east on Changde Road and west again. A line of tricycle carts, weighed down by oil drums, creaked north and commuters parted around them like shoals of fish, their trousers fluttering. Time slowed.
A woman shouted at her to get out of the way and a flatbed truck, crusted in mud, nearly knocked her down as it rushed by. “Are you deaf?” a l
ittle boy shouted. He was holding a stick for no reason. He ran away with his weapon. “Capitalist Miss!” a woman spat at her, but when Zhuli turned to look back, the woman was gone. On and on she walked until she found herself back at the Conservatory once more. The courtyard and the building were deserted, as if it were Spring Festival and all the musicians had gone home for the holidays.
Her footsteps echoed nervously in the empty hallways. She went up to Sparrow’s office, but when she knocked, no one answered.
On the third floor, her class, the orchestral class, appeared to be cancelled. Out of some fifty students, only six were present. Nobody looked up when she came in. The Professor, known as Go Slow, was missing. Eventually the other five students wandered off. The now empty room seemed to close in around her. An aimless inspection of her schoolbag revealed a copy of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which she had borrowed from the library days ago and had been carrying in her schoolbag without realizing. Zhuli opened it across six desks. The copy was dirty, smudged by pencil marks and eraser dust. Beethoven, she knew, had never intended for this concerto to have so feudal a name as “Emperor.” The name had attached itself long after his death. She followed the solo piano through its ascents and tumbling falls, and into the second movement, a B major dream and sorrow extending like a paper accordion.
If there was indeed an emperor in this concerto, she concluded, he was not a king at all, but a man with ambitions of greatness, an emperor in his own mind, a child who once imagined a different life but had come to see the disconnection between what he aspired to be and what he was capable of being. In 1811, when Beethoven was almost fully deaf, he performed this piano concerto, but the music that the composer heard in his mind failed to move his listeners. The performance was a disaster and, until his death, Beethoven rarely performed again. But what had mattered most in that moment, Zhuli wondered: the concerto in his mind or the concerto of his audience? What mattered most in this moment: the words on the posters or the lives–of her parents, of Ba Lute and Sparrow–in suspension, the promise of Mao Zedong thought or the day-to-day reality of New China? Which would win out, the Shanghai of utopia, or the city of the real?
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