“How?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. His picked up his brush and continued writing. The small stack of notebooks beside him seemed to lift slightly, like the ribs of an accordion. She studied the photo he kept beside him. Zhuli was holding her violin as if it was the instrument, the wood and strings — and not her thoughts, not her future — that needed protecting. What if this is where I should stay, Ai-ming wondered. What if I can’t survive on my own? She felt like a stranger to herself, as if her body was in fact a giant house, but she had only ever bothered to visit one room.
“How to continue,” Wen said. “Your father wondered this too. For many years he didn’t write music at all. Chairman Mao gave us one way of looking at the world, and so did Marx, Engels and Lenin. All the poets and writers, all the philosophers. They agreed on the problems but never the solutions. Shostakovich and Bach gave your father another way of listening. I think about your father every day…Perhaps, later on, when he composed again, he tried to hear these different voices simultaneously with his own, so that his music would have to come from broken music, so that the truths he understood wouldn’t erase the world but would be part of it. When I was alone, I often asked myself, Can a single hand cover the sky? How can we live like this and see so little? Ai-ming…I have so many regrets. Everyone tells me how much you resemble Zhuli. Don’t ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?”
She didn’t understand.
His brush came to the end of a line. Chapter 42, when May Fourth reaches the end of the desert. She’s aged so much, and her friend Da-wei has long since passed on from this world.
“Uncle Wen, how many chapters do you think there are?”
“Once I asked my wife the very same question. She told me, Wen the Dreamer, it’s foolhardy to think that a story ends. There are as many possible endings as beginnings.’ ”
—
The desert air made Ai-ming feel lightheaded. She had taken to sleeping early, waking late, and to napping after lunch and before dinner. Each time she opened her eyes, she felt as if her head was enormous, her hands tiny, and her lungs crushed. One afternoon, she woke up and heard the voices of her three caretakers and Big Mother Knife, who had arrived from the South to be with them, and had managed to obtain false papers for Ai-ming. Big Mother could see very little now, and sometimes, when she thought too much about Sparrow and her boys, tears leaked from her good eye, itself now failing. Ai-ming had never seen her grandmother mourn, she would gently wipe the tears and Big Mother would grumble, “Who’s that?” “It’s me.” “Ah, you.”
“If my granddaughter crosses into Kyrgyzstan,” Big Mother was saying now, “what’s the next logical step?”
“Are you kidding? If she makes it even that far, the next step would be a generous cash offering to the Queen Mother of the West.” This was Projectionist Bang.
“What about arranging passage through Istanbul? She says she wants to go to Canada.”
“Canada?”
“Sparrow has a friend there. A musician.” Big Mother paused. “Sparrow had.”
Ai-ming stared unblinking at the bright room. The truth was, she was terrified of the future. She would never study at Beijing University, never follow Yiwen, never join the Communist Party and then never renounce her membership, never leave flowers at Tiananmen Square. Ai-ming had written the examinations, she had scored high, but when the results came, she had told her mother she would not, could not, stay. Ling had not seemed surprised. “Your father wanted you to be able to choose,” she said. But what if it was all a mistake? What if she simply didn’t have the courage? It would take courage to continue living in Beijing. Her mother had already quit her job at the radio station, and moved back to Shanghai to be with the Old Cat. Ai-ming was afraid that life, which had seemed to be expanding forward, had stopped and turned around. That it would carry her forever backwards.
She thought she had been weeping soundlessly, but Swirl came into the room. She was as graceful and beautiful as a written word, but any word could be so easily erased. One day, Ai-ming thought, unable to stop the flow of emotion, I’ll open my eyes and every one of you will be gone, and I’ll be all alone. Swirl stroked her hair. When her great-aunt looked at her, what did she see? Am I truly a construction? One day, will someone become a construction of me, a replica?
“I’m so afraid, Aunt Swirl. I’m afraid to be alone.”
“I promise you, Ai-ming, it will get easier in time.”
She slept and when she woke again it was dark. The voices of Swirl and Big Mother circled in the night.
“And the camp that Wen escaped from…”
Swirl said, “Did I ever tell you? He went back to see it but it had disappeared. The entire camp has been swallowed by the desert as if it never was.”
“Do you remember…” The stop and start of Big Mother’s voice broke Ai-ming’s heart.
“The Red Mountain People’s Refreshment House,” Swirl said.
Big Mother murmured.
“Shanghai during the Occupation,” Swirl said. “The green hat you made for Sparrow. The words to ‘Jasmine.’ The Old Cat. Da-wei and May Fourth. Zhuli snoring in our little hut, and kicking you off the bed.”
“The four widows you lived with.”
“The little boy who led the line of blind musicians, hand to elbow, elbow to hand. The three of us walking the length of the country.”
“So many children,” Big Mother said.
Ai-ming heard the sound of a cup set down.
“You’ll come back to live with me, won’t you? You and Wen.”
“You won’t be able to get rid of us,” Swirl answered.
“She was a good child,” Big Mother said. “A courageous girl.”
Swirl was humming a fragment of music, a small piece of the unending sonata that Sparrow had written. Big Mother took the words from “Song of the Cold Rain,” from “In That Remote Place,” and joining in, sang them over Swirl’s music. The melodies came from songs and poems Ai-ming half recognized, songs her father had sung when she was a child. The harmony was rich and also broken, because the two women were so much older now, and they had loved and let go of so many things, but still the music and its counterpoint remained. “Destined to arrive in a swirl of dust,” Big Mother sang. “And to rise inexorably like mist on the river.”
Ai-ming sat up in bed. She listened.
AI-MING CARRIED A small suitcase. At the beginning it was full and heavy, but it was depleted little by little over the course of a journey that took more than three months.
An elderly woman who had once been a translator met her at the Kyrgyzstan border and went with her to Istanbul.
From Istanbul, she flew to Toronto.
In her suitcase she had packed a single change of clothes, toothbrush, washcloth, soap and a tea thermos; a photograph of Zhuli, Kai and her father; a letter from Yiwen. She felt like Da-wei crossing the sea, like a smuggler or a piece of code. Her father had never had the chance to cross the borders of his country.
I have done these things for my parents, she thought, and for myself. Could it be that everything in this life has been written from the beginning? Ai-ming could not accept this. I am taking this written record with me, she thought. I am keeping it safe. Even if everything repeats, it is not the same. It was just as Wen the Dreamer said: she could take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. She would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.