Wen the Dreamer and Swirl left in the night, in a bid to escape to the borderlands. Mongolia could be reached in two days, and Wen had contacts who could help them on the other side.
The following morning, Big Mother began a letter to Zhuli, her good eye right up to the page. She would find a way to send it, along with letters from Swirl and Wen, once she felt it was safe to do so. My heart has been heavy all day long, she thought, remembering the poem she had recited at her sister’s wedding. Your elder sister has looked out for you. And now you are both crying and cannot part, Yet it is right that you should go on….
In the letter to Zhuli, she wrote, “I watched them depart on one small horse. Can you imagine? As if they were young again.” Her tears wrinkled the page. She folded the letter and hid the words away. That evening, she went to the local Party secretary and told them her sister had slipped and fallen into the Wei River. She had tried to save Swirl, but the current had been too strong, the fetid water, polluted with waste from the factories, had carried her away. The Party secretary convened a search team. After five days, with no sign of the body and anxious about rising production quotas and the new political campaign, he pronounced Swirl dead, signed her papers and closed her file.
—
In Shanghai, Sparrow was taken away by Red Guards and for a week they had no word of him. A different group came for Zhuli on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then left her alone until Sunday. Sunday was the worst and the Red Guards came again on Monday. On Tuesday, Sparrow came home, starving and exhausted, but unharmed. He’d been held in isolation in a storage room and then let go. It was inexplicable. On the streets, loudspeakers blared from every corner. The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers. In the middle of the broadcast, Red Guards entered the house. Despite Sparrow’s begging, despite his grip on Zhuli, they took her. Her hand slipped out of his. In truth, the fear in Sparrow’s voice had so terrified her, Zhuli had closed her eyes and pulled her hand free.
At first, Zhuli’s classmates had been inventive. They had new slogans and methods, they had new implements like garbage pails, conductor’s batons and razors. There was a comedic quality to it all, one laugh crashing down onto the next, explosive laughter, barbed laughter, tripwire laughter, questions that were not questions, the confessions they wanted that had nothing to do with confession.
On and on they sang:
The water of socialism nourished me, I grew up beneath the Red Flag
I took the oath,
To dare to think, to speak up, to act,
To devote myself to revolution.
They loved to sing. It was the way they looked at her, the utter implacability, the contempt, she couldn’t bear. The revolutionaries soon lost interest in their own implements, and now they beat her with their bare hands. Kai said that she had always cared more about music and her desires than about the Party. He said he had tried to instruct her on the correct works, even going so far as to copy them out by hand for her, but she had rejected them. Her parents were enemies of the People and Zhuli refused to denounce them. She was loose and had no morals, she was degenerate. All passions should be subsumed to revolution, he said. He talked and talked and would not stop, but he never mentioned Sparrow’s name and never betrayed him. When he ran out of words, he left and did not come back. After this, she felt she understood everything. Music began with the act of composition but she herself was only an instrument, a glass to hold the water. If she answered the accusations or defended herself, she would no longer be able to hear the world that was finally seeping into her. Loud, strange music. She kept turning her head to try to place this second orchestra, this outer room, and meanwhile the revolutionary youth kept trying to make her face forward and look at the floor. She saw their hands shouting and their mouths smiling. Silently, she berated herself. Animals, she thought, do not weep. Instead they never look away.
That day, Sparrow brought her home. He couldn’t stop weeping and she realized she’d never seen him fall apart and it frightened her. But he was safe, she thought. The Red Guards had not harmed him. She thought that Kai was protecting him. Always, the pianist was just behind Sparrow, watchful, but perhaps it was all in her mind. Still, some link between the three of them could never be broken, it was the future that was to have been, if only the country had chosen a different path. She wanted to ask Kai so many questions. She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn’t the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions. She wanted to tell him, “Don’t let them hurt your hands. Your gifted hands.” She wanted to tell Sparrow, “No matter what happens, you must finish your symphony. Please don’t let it disappear.” Did it matter more to love or to have been loved? If anyone answered her question, she didn’t catch the words. I am so far away now, Zhuli thought, that words dissolve before they reach me.
How far is that, she thought. She felt terribly alone. How much farther?
—
With Da Shan and Flying Bear away in Zhejiang, the laneway house was quiet. On Thursday, she woke very early as she used to do. The inky darkness of the night protected her as she put on her favourite blue dress, pinned the rough edges of her hair aside, gathered what she needed and slipped through the front door. The gods of silence protected her and neither Sparrow nor her uncle woke; or if they did wake, they chose not to stop her from leaving. The night was a dream, a pure warmth that settled on her and seemed to ease her awake. She could barely walk and yet nothing hurt. She took side streets and alleyways to the Conservatory and the journey lasted a long time. Small fires burned. She came to an intersection that was piled high with books. They looked as if they had been overturned from a truck, they made a shape like a sand dune. Here and there were groups of students sleeping outside. One woke and watched her passing but seemed to think Zhuli was part of her dream; the Red Guard gazed at her and did nothing. There were posters everywhere, a mute shouting that surrounded Zhuli but no longer frightened her. She did not know how or why, but now that she understood, now that she had come to a decision, the old fears had drained away. Asleep, the revolutionaries appeared innocent, they seemed as nothing. Zhuli walked and saw buildings, littered streets, damaged lights, scraps of clothing, broken furniture. She felt the hardness of the pavement, the blue-black air and even the weightlessness of her dress. No matter which way she turned, the roads twisted and led her to the Conservatory, this had always been the course of her life. Past the gate, the courtyard was alive with shapes, small and large piles of trash which she moved between as if they were a row of empty seats. The Conservatory door had been propped open with a shoe, she did not know why, but she left the shoe in place, nudged the door wider and went inside. She thought she saw abandoned programs, lost handbags, forgotten coats and then, after a moment, the hallucination passed and she came to the staircase she had first climbed when she was a child, when Sparrow, holding her hand, had brought her to study with Professor Tan.
The Conservatory smelled of both damp and fire, a smell that seemed, as she moved through the building, to be coming from the workshop where Professor Tan had built violins using thin boards of parasol-tree wood. Zhuli stopped and looked in the door, thinking perhaps there was a violin that she could take with her and play, a violin that she could make her own. But there was nothing. Bits of wood looked as if they had been flung in joyous celebration at the windows. She went on. At the fourth floor, she turned down the hallway and saw the same posters that Kai had shown her many weeks ago. Zhuli began to pull them down. Witch. It was slow and noisy work. The papers made a terrible noise but it no longer mattered. There were so many, the posters seemed to proliferate as she removed them. She took out the red marker she had slipped
into her pocket and stood before the last poster, ready to strike, but the hallway was so rigidly devoid of life she could not think of any words. Once Debussy had trickled through the walls. She heard it now, again, and was grateful, it was as if all the gods were gathering, they had come to meet her here. What had become of He Luting and and all the rest? The parents of Fou Ts’ong had taken poison and killed themselves. It was being celebrated. The rest must have gone away somewhere. Had the older generation seen everything coming and quietly dissolved before the hammer fell? She hoped so. She lifted the marker again and wrote the only words that came to her. She did not put down the writer’s name, Shen Congwen, or the novel, Border Town. The marker moved as if of its own accord. This is what is in my mind, she thought, another person’s words.
THE OLD FERRYMAN COULDN’T GUESS WHAT THE OBSTACLE WAS, OR HOW TO FIX IT. HE’D LIE IN BED, MULLING IT OVER UNTIL FINALLY IT BEGAN TO OCCUR TO HIM THAT PERHAPS CUICUI LOVED THE YOUNGER BROTHER, NOT THE ELDER. THAT MADE HIM SMILE, AN UNNATURAL SMILE FROM FEAR. IN TRUTH HE WAS A LITTLE WORRIED, BECAUSE IT SUDDENLY OCCURRED TO HIM THAT CUICUI WAS LIKE HER MOTHER IN EVERY WAY. HE HAD A VAGUE FEELING THAT MOTHER AND DAUGHTER WOULD SHARE THE SAME FATE. EVENTS OF THE PAST SWARMED INTO HIS MIND AND HE COULD NO LONGER SLEEP. HE RAN OUT THE DOOR ALONE, ONTO THE HIGH BLUFFS BY THE CREEK. HE LOOKED UP AT THE STARS AND LISTENED TO THE KATYDIDS AND SOUNDS OF THE OTHER INSECTS, CONSTANT AS RAIN. HE COULD NOT SLEEP FOR A VERY LONG TIME.
She wrote directly overtop of the denunciations on the poster, so that “brother” appeared over “leader,” “vague” over “reactionary,” and “high bluffs” sat overtop “demon-exposing mirror.” Borrowed words over borrowed words, they were all attached to one another now. She turned and saw the soft shapes of paper on the floor. They had been blunted by falling and the words which had looked like joints turned out to have no weight at all. She dropped the red marker on the floor and felt consoled by its sharp clatter and went on, down the hallway until she came to the office that Sparrow shared with Old Wu. The door was closed but unlocked and Zhuli felt lightened as she entered the room. Nobody had ransacked the office. The records and books, few as they were, the portraits of Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai and Vice-Premier Liu Shaoqi, everything remained neat and ordered, as if they belonged to another time and place. She stared at the portraits and saw her own shadow in the glass. There she was finally, completely visible, the girl and the sky and fate twisted together.
“Sparrow will understand,” she told herself, knowing that it was not true. But maybe he would understand, there was a devil inside her and Zhuli had no choice. She had to protect it. She could not let them restrain it.
She laid some of her cousin’s records on the floor and studied them. My first sentence was “Make revolution.” Mahler’s Fifth, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Prokofiev’s Fifth, Beethoven’s “Emperor.” I took the oath, to dare to think, to speak up, to act. She did not want to hear a violin and so the record she put on was Bach. She wanted to walk slowly, there was no longer any need to rush. Time extended inside Bach, there were repetitions and canons, there were circles and spirals, there were many voices and honest humility as if he knew that reincarnation and loss were inseparable. The music no longer seemed to come from the record player, but from some chamber of her memory. She thought of Kai and then resolved to think of him no more. In her mind, she feared most for Sparrow, because she knew him as well as she knew herself. He would let his talent burn away, he dared not admit that talent was a precious thing. She wanted to tell her mother and father that she had come to a high plateau from where she could see in every direction, and she wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t fear she was walking away from, but discontinuity. She could not stand the loneliness. In this brief window when she still knew who she was, before they broke her down again, she wished to choose a future and to leave. How could she put these thoughts in a note? She wanted to preserve the core of herself. If they took away music, if they broke her hands, who would she be? A note would be taken up by the Red Guards, a note would only cause further humiliation. She had a strong belief that Wen the Dreamer was alive, that Swirl and Big Mother Knife were safe, and a fervent desire that they understand her choice. When she had turned the record over and both sides had finished playing, she took the rope from her coat pocket, removed her shoes, climbed up onto Sparrow’s desk, careful not to disrupt his papers. She attached the rope to a long pipe that ran along the wall. She climbed down and pushed the desk away, keeping the chair where it was. She looped and carefully tied the rope. It was very quiet and she wondered if she should say something, if she should speak and make a noise. Zhuli did not mean to weep but it was beyond her, this body and its responses, this body and its desires. She thought of the hidden library. She opened the lid and looked inside, she saw the ancient instrument on which she had first learned to listen. She thought of Sparrow, how young he was when he had opened the door that let her into this life. Was it possible to walk away, to abandon him and at the same time, to protect him? The first aria of the Goldberg Variations was also its end. Could it be that everything in this life had been written from the beginning? She could not accept this. I am taking this written record with me, she thought. It is mine and I’m the only one who can keep it safe. She let go.
—
Sparrow woke in the dark, aware of the front door opening. It seemed to remain open for a long moment before finally, almost imperceptibly, shutting. Sparrow felt as if he were groping through a dream that still continued, he had to shoulder through it, he had to make it burn away. The dream involved men walking on a frozen river and machetes hacking through the ice. Finally, it broke. He opened his eyes and the shape beside him became the outline of a window. An elongated figure widened into a bookshelf. He reached for the thin cover but it had already fallen away. After a moment he stood up and, careful not to creak the floorboards, went to the room that Zhuli shared with Aunt Swirl. He touched the empty bed.
Zhuli had gone to see the Old Cat.
He did not know how he knew this; he could think of no other reason for Zhuli to break curfew. The bed still seemed warm from his cousin’s body.
In the stickiness of the hot night, his shirt had glued to his back. Sparrow poured water into Zhuli’s basin and washed his face. When he caught sight of his reflection, he was surprised at his thinness. Had he fallen ill, he wondered. Had he lost weeks or months of time? In the glass, he looked as if he were still a young man, almost a student. He pondered his reflection, half expecting it to vanish. Back in his room, he changed his clothes; he pulled one of Da Shan’s red armbands over his left sleeve. The armband would make him invisible. Once more, he ran his hands over his face and looked into the glass. There were voices drifting in through the closed window. Young men, Red Guards it seemed, in the alleyway. Sparrow could hear the detritus of a fire being kicked and smothered. He could smell burning. They were singing, softly, as if they were suddenly concerned about the residents of the laneway and did not wish to wake them. Slowed-down beats of music, dreaming auras of song. A young man’s pure, strong tenor, sliding off the walls of the alleyway. This is the beautiful Motherland / This is the place where I grew up.
—
Later on, Sparrow came to know that he had taken the rope from around his cousin’s neck. He had somehow managed to gather Zhuli in his arms, climb down and leave the room. Outside the Conservatory, it had still been early. He took side streets and if people came up to him or spoke to him, he did not register their presence. After walking several blocks, it dawned on Sparrow that the sound of the city was dulled. Six trucks bearing water drums navigated the narrow lane, but he only became aware of their presence when he caught sight of them. There was a vibration in the pavement, and there were women at a water spigot, and there was a queue for flour, but he moved through them as if through images or projections. He kept walking and became aware of Ling running towards him, and of Zhuli in his arms as if she were sleeping. He had to focus all his mind, all his energy, on
keeping her from falling. Her head against his shoulder dug into him. Red Guards came and pushed their faces against his face, but he could not hear them. There was a crowd of them. And then, he did not know how or why, he no longer saw them. He came to Beijing Road, to the gate, the narrow laneway and the maze of alleyways he had known nearly all his life. Ling was still beside him, but why had she come? Ba Lute was there. He had seen them somehow or he had been alerted. It happened so quickly, Ba Lute’s approach, Zhuli taken into Ba Lute’s arms, and Sparrow standing by himself in his own home. He knew his father was calling Zhuli’s name, he knew because now he could hear. The room suddenly became very loud. Ling was sobbing. People had gathered in the alleyway, but nobody dared cross into the inner courtyard, it had been so polluted by crimes and spirits. Ba Lute, whose great bulk had turned so thin and old, was crying out, as if he could wake her, “What mistakes did we make? We’re old, we’re old now. If I sat down and wrote down all our mistakes, would that be enough? Answer me! What everlasting sins did we commit? Didn’t we win this country? Didn’t we sacrifice ourselves for the Revolution?” He kept shaking Zhuli as if he could drag her back to this place. Sparrow sat down on a chair. He remembered now how the tears on his cousin’s face had still been wet. How long did it take for tears to dry? How close had he come to arriving in time? He thought of Wen the Dreamer and his Aunt Swirl and his mother. He closed his eyes and tried to drown out Ba Lute’s voice. Ling reappeared. She put a blanket around him and blocked out the world. He remembered the blanket that had covered him on the bus with Kai, the music that rang out, the constellations above them. He laughed and disregarded his weeping, which sounded as if came from another person. He laughed and wept until midday came, and with it the true August heat.
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