Sometimes, in Vancouver, I go to the apartment where my mother, my father and I used to live. I imagine that Ai-ming and I, in the most extraordinary of circumstances, will meet one another there. The street is the same, the apartment blocks have barely changed. Sometimes people’s lives fold back together, sometimes all they need is a meeting place, good fortune, faith. Years ago, Ai-ming told me that her mother used to stand in the intersection of Muxidi, waiting for Sparrow, remembering, long after his life had ended.
—
June 20, 2016. In Shanghai, two lamps shone by the window where Professor Liu stood holding his violin. With his great, white eyebrows, he reminded me of a snow lily. The pianist, Mrs. Wang, in a midnight-blue silk dress, sat at the piano, ready.
Beside me, Professor Liu’s daughter, our sound engineer, gazed sternly into her laptop. She dragged her headphones off, massaged her forehead and dropped the headphones back on. In Shanghai dialect, she asked for a sound check. The musicians played the opening of Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C Minor.
There were thirty people in the room, mostly musicians and composers, some of whom had known Sparrow decades ago. In the first row, Yiwen was hugging her daughter to her side. To her left was Ai-ming’s great-aunt, the Old Cat.
The room stilled. Professor Liu lifted his violin. Sparrow’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, dedicated to my father, began.
At first, the violin played alone, a seam of notes that slowly widened. When the piano entered, I saw a man turning in measured, elegant circles, I saw him looking for the centre that eluded him, this beautiful centre that promised an end to sorrow, the lightness of freedom. The piano stepped forward and the violin lifted, a man crossing a room and a girl weeping as she climbed a flight of steps; they played as if one sphere could merge into the other, as if they could arrive in time and be redeemed in a single overlapping moment. And even when the notes they played were the very same, the piano and violin were irrevocably apart, drawn by different lives and different times. Yet in their separateness, and in the quiet, they contained one another. Long ago, Ai-ming copied out a poem for me:
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree.
Earth endures, heaven endures, even though both shall end.
Sound waves walked across the computer screen, recurring yet unpredictable, repeating yet never the same. I saw the Old Cat’s head, nodding. Against the window, the curtains continued to move.
In this room, there was only the act of listening, there was only Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli. A counting down and a counting up, an ending that could never be a true ending. The not yet was still to come, and the book remained unfinished. We loved and were loved.
Ai-ming, I thought, you and I are still here.
Around us, the first movement expanded, turning like smoke.
IN DUNHUANG, in the far west of China, Swirl, Wen the Dreamer and Projectionist Bang were sorting through photocopies. It was 1990. Ai-ming sat across the table from them, watching the slight movement of their three grey heads. They were all staying in the rooms of Projectionist Bang, resting for several weeks so that onward travel arrangements could be made. Here, the summer sky was a deep, silvery white.
Projectionist Bang, who had a face like a dried pink plum, made his living sweeping the grounds of the famous Mogao Caves. Ai-ming liked to hear about the caves, and so she asked him now which was his favourite. Projectionist Bang welcomed the interruption. He said that some of the Mogao Caves were painted with visions of paradise, images that dated to the fourth century. “But the painters’ idea of paradise was only a copy of life on earth,” he said. “Dancing, wine, books, meat and music. Paradise offers all the things we’ve never learned to properly distribute, despite the excellence of our residents’ committees and our people’s communes.”
Behind his small brick house, the dirt road led out into the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Just this morning, a camel train had swayed by, returning home after a seventy-eight-day journey across the Gobi, the emptied humps of the animals sagging over like devastated pillows. Having never seen a camel in her life, Ai-ming had thought their humps were injured. Projectionist Bang had laughed so hard, his hearing aid had fallen out. Ai-ming had wanted to disappear into the ground, or though the nearby gate of Jiayuguan, the Gate of Sorrows, where the western reach of the Great Wall came to an end. She had once fancied herself a scholar, but she didn’t even know that a camel’s hump emptied and grew soft like a deflated balloon.
Swirl had intervened, reminiscing of a camel she had known in her thirties, during her time at Farm 835. The camel’s name had been Sasha.
Now, again, Projectionist Bang was struggling with his hearing aid and it looked like he was trying to reattach his ear. “Oh,” he said, when he had managed to get it right. “About the piano you wanted, I found one. The pianist is an old rightist, exiled to Dunhuang in 1958, used to be a physicist. His sentence finally ended last year but he hasn’t got around to going home. It’s just like the old books say, ‘Even the Emperor is an exile on these dusty roads.’ Anyway, we looked over the piece of music, those nine pages, and he said he could prepare it in a few days. Stitch it together somehow. At least we’ll get an idea of what it sounded like.”
“Projectionist Bang,” Swirl said, “if you play the violin part, I think it will be just right. Can you do it on your erhu?”
“Sure, sure,” Bang said. “We’re a bloody orchestra out here.”
—
Ai-ming, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer had been travelling together for five weeks, 2,500 kilometres, by train, bus, cart, moped and foot. Her great-uncle and great-aunt, already in their seventies, had the tenacity of llamas. Everything they owned was packed in a single suitcase, a piece of luggage meticulously cared for, yet so battered it looked as if it had lived ten thousand lives. Swirl and Wen could survive on hot water and radishes, eating sunlight and dusty air. She wasn’t sure if they slept because whenever she opened her eyes, at midnight or 3 a.m. or dawn, they were always awake.
Wen had told her stories of the desert, Comrade Glass Eye and her own father, the Bird of Quiet. Swirl told her about Big Mother Knife, Lady Dostoevsky and Zhuli. Sometimes Ai-ming cried for no reason, even when the story was a happy one. Sometimes, when the story was sad, she felt nothing, not even the beating of her own heart.
Now, Swirl was sorting through the pages of another set of the Book of Records because they had fallen on the ground and gotten out of order. Ai-ming was watching Wen the Dreamer. His face had an angular sharpness, an immense calm. In the sunlight, his white hair was nearly transparent.
Wen had decided to hand-copy the last chapter. He was using the cursive script and, as he drew each character, the brush barely left the page. There was something circular, watery and eternal about it all.
He looked up at her and set aside his brush. The word he had just written was 宇 (yǔ) which meant both room and universe. “Child, do you know where you want to go?”
She remembered walking with her father to Tiananmen Square and how she had said to him: Canada. Now she said, “I don’t know. I just want to leave everything behind.”
He looked at her sadly. “But after doing even that, one day you might have to find another way to continue.”