—
Alone once more, Sparrow picked up the envelope again. It was true, there was nowhere to hide anything in this house, or even this neighbourhood, not even a bag of peas or a guilty thought. He reread Wen the Dreamer’s letter, then he took the box of matches from the window ledge, held the letter over the cigarette tin and set it alight. Wen’s handwriting became distorted and round, long and thin, until every sentence was the same: nothing but residue. But Sparrow remembered every word as if the brief letter was a poem or Bach partita. He could stand up and deliver it now, word for word, note for note.
—
All morning, the words floated through Sparrow’s thoughts and would not leave him, even when Flying Bear dropped his breakfast on the floor and Da Shan walked barefoot into porcelain shards. The letter continued even as Sparrow washed blood, pottery and breakfast out of Da Shan’s foot.
“Should we go to the clinic? Probably I need stitches?”
“I don’t think so. Antiseptic should do.”
“Of course.” His voice a disappointed trombone.
Meanwhile, Swirl cleaned the floor, Ba Lute dished out another bowl of food, his mother yelled at everyone, and Flying Bear pretended to spear his brother in the back.
The letter sat in his mind and brought unexpected tears to Sparrow’s eyes.
Da Shan leaned forward, wiped the tears away with his delicate fingers and said nothing.
My dear friend, I trust this letter finds you well and that you remember me, your dreaming friend who treasures you like his own son. Today I am neither in the east nor the west. One day I will tell you all the vagaries, cliff-hangers and digressions of the story. But, in short: I escaped from H — camp and have gone into hiding. I cannot describe conditions to you, little bird. The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes. For the last month, I have been searching for a safe house. Last week, fate brought me to Shanghai and I saw my family. They did not see me and I did not dare make myself known. The authorities closed in and I left the city headed for G — Province. Little bird, please do all you can to prevent my family from searching for me. I must close this letter. A book could not hold all I wish to say.
Your friend,
Comrade “Bach”
P.S. I have found a further chapter of our Book of Records.
It came into my hands in the most unlikely of places, after my transfer from J—.
P.P.S. If ever the chance presents itself, seek out Comrade Glass Eye in the Village of Cats and do present a copy of the Book of Records to him. He was my companion at J — and his preferred composer is Schönberg. Tell him you are well acquainted with his childhood friends, the adventurer, Da-wei, and the fearless May Fourth.
Three days passed before officers from the Public Security Bureau showed up at the door. Like the destitute stranger, the officers came early in the morning, before breakfast was even on the table. Unlike him, they banged on the laneway gate and bullied their way in. They said that the “counter-revolutionary, criminal, rightist, political pollutant”…and here they had to pause and search through their papers…“Comrade Wen!”…had escaped, critically injuring two army officers. They accused Ba Lute of harbouring an enemy of the state.
Ba Lute listened calmly, but when the two officers announced that Swirl and Zhuli must come immediately for questioning, he leaped forward, flinging down the draft of Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3 that happened to be in his hands. “How dare you shame me in my own house!” he shouted. He began rampaging through the rooms. “Come over here! Is Comrade Wen under the bed? Is he in the closet? Did we use his corpse to fuel the stove? Check the garbage pail, shit house and laundry bag!” He hurled objects across the room as the security officers, pale and unconditioned, knocked each other down in their haste to escape the careening objects of Ba Lute. Sparrow’s father was taller than ever but only half as round, and therefore twice as intimidating. “Comrade Wen has the aggression of a falling leaf! How did he injure two officers? The way a drop of rain injures the pavement? Who’s selling potatoes here?”
“Uncle—” Zhuli said.
“Have you lost your mind?” Big Mother Knife said calmly.
“I’ve had enough!” Ba Lute shouted. “You’ve wrongly imprisoned his wife! That’s right! Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu! Check the records yourselves, she’s been resurrected! She’s working for the Party now and she’s probably ranked higher than you are! You little shits have stained our Revolution and one day I’m going to haul you before Chen Yi himself and have him whip your balls. Donkeys! Do you have any clue who I am?”
Mrs. Ma was summoned and she sternly informed the officers that she was the head of the residential committee, and there were absolutely no escaped rightists in her jurisdiction. The very thought, she murmured, was appalling. Everyone here had their papers and household registration in order, they could be sure of that. She tossed her sleek head and offered to escort the officers outside.
Beside the door, Sparrow said nothing. The pages of his symphony, flung aside by Ba Lute, had shoe prints on them. He went to gather them up.
Only when the officers were gone did Swirl turn to Big Mother. “Did they say that Wen escaped?”
“Yes,” she said. Her better eye moistened and she turned away to gauge the destruction that had befallen her house.
“But how?” Swirl said, sitting down. “Where could he go?”
Ba Lute blustered back into the room, yelling, “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what have I done?” Sparrow hustled his younger brothers into the kitchen, distracting them with little sugar pyramids and a quick game of Watching the Tiger, and then he went to the balcony and peered into the can that held the ashes of Wen the Dreamer’s letter. There were a dozen ends of cigarettes, a thick wad of tobacco but not a trace of the page, the writing or the words. Sparrow looked over the railing. In the laneway, the two officers were deep in agitated conversation. Mrs. Ma was firmly shaking her head. Waste water from the gutter circled their feet.
The letter had disappeared for good, Sparrow thought. It had dissolved into the air itself, escaped to where no officer, spy or committee chairman could ever retrieve it. At the first opportunity, when no one else was around, he would tell Aunt Swirl what Wen the Dreamer had written.
—
Sparrow left with Zhuli, his cousin clutching her violin case in both arms, walking with one foot narrowly in front of the other as if she regretted every inch of space she inhabited. Against the grey-blue wave of oncoming pedestrians, Sparrow wanted to clear a path for her and so he walked with his chest out and his slender arms swinging, deluding himself that he was a tank and not a paper boat. But nobody, not even schoolchildren, moved aside for him. Bicycles whizzed so close their handlebars clipped his elbows. How unlike Ba Lute he was. Given his father’s heft, Sparrow felt soft, flimsy and inessential.
The tram arrived. Zhuli turned and smiled distractedly back at him before the rippling blue of her dress disappeared among the other passengers. They did not meet up again until the gates of the Conservatory, where she called down to him from above. Zhuli was balanced gracefully on a concrete ledge, one hand hooked around the iron fence, the rest of her body tipped to the side. Her hair, gathered into a long braid, sat on her shoulder and the ends seemed alive in the breeze. Inside the gates, the pianist Yin Chai, the brightest star of the Conservatory and admittedly appealing in army-style shirt and trousers, was sitting on a bench. He had returned from Moscow after taking second place in the Tchaikovsky competition and everywhere he went, or so it seemed to Sparrow, a flood of stage lights followed him.