She frowned at him and smoothed her dress.
“It’s nothing,” Sparrow said. “Just a few lazy thoughts of mine.” He gathered the sheets, Kai’s note and an essay he had been consulting, and cleared everything away. “Kai,” he said “if you hurry, you can still make it to Yin Chai’s recital. You won’t even be late.”
“But aren’t we meeting? I left you a note.” His face, even his handsome cap, seemed to fall. Sparrow felt as if he had accidentally closed a piano lid on the young man’s fingers.
“Teacher Sparrow is composing,” Zhuli said solemnly. “Have you eaten, Kai? Take these.”
Sparrow watched the paper bag leap from one hand to the other. He felt old when he said, “Please don’t leave crumbs on Wu Li’s sofa.”
Kai looked hungrily into the paper bag. “Old Wu? He’ll send his mother to clean them. Or maybe his grandmother.”
His cousin let a laugh escape.
They were so lighthearted, these two. Zhuli’s arms were bare but she seemed not to feel the breeze of the open window.
Kai looked at him with a direct, unsettling frankness. “It would be good to go outside, stroll in the park and listen to the music of the People.” The sun warmed Sparrow’s hands. “Come, Teacher. You’ve been at work since dawn. And wasn’t it your birthday?”
“He never celebrates,” Zhuli said. “He starves himself of joy. Luckily, joy seeps into all his compositions.”
“Don’t either of you have lessons?” Sparrow said, trying to maintain his dignity.
“All the pianists are downstairs, writing self-criticisms. I stayed up all night reading the book you lent me, and then I came at two in the morning to work on Mozart’s Concerto No. 9. It was just me and the stray dogs and the wind. Even the the most stubborn old grandmas weren’t out lining up for meat.”
“Up since 2 a.m.!” Zhuli said, clearly impressed.
Sparrow tried to think of an escape route. He wanted to be alone with the window, the papers on his desk, and the freedom of his thoughts.
“An hour,” Zhuli said. “Steal an hour from your life and give it to us.”
She smiled at him, a smile as big and openhearted as Aunt Swirl’s when he was a child, and so he did.
—
In the park, Zhuli and the pianist walked on either side of him, as if afraid Sparrow would make a run for it. What do the sparrow and the swallow know, he thought again, of the ways of swans? There was a swan, as it happened, in the shade of the pond, fluffing her grey-white wings, trying to appear larger and more deadly than she was. He heard the softness of her trilling.
“The room I live in,” the pianist was saying, “is the size of one and a half men lying down. I have just enough space to turn over and back again.”
Zhuli’s violin case swung as she walked. “How come you don’t board at the Conservatory? Maybe you prefer sleeping in a cave.”
“I had to pull all sorts of strings to get this terrible room, but it’s near my stepfather. He was ill last year…anyway, the mice are good company.”
Zhuli ducked under a low branch. “Be careful or the mice will multiply and take over the cat’s room.”
When Kai laughed, his hair stood upright in the wind.
Without Sparrow’s noticing the transition, Zhuli was telling the pianist about Ba Lute and the confrontation with the public security officers this morning. The pianist’s walk slowed. “What camp was your father at again?” he said.
“I don’t know. But it’s in Gansu Province, isn’t it, cousin?”
“I’m not sure, Zhuli.”
She tensed. Faint perspiration gleamed on her forehead and her cheeks. She looked as if she could take on any campaign, criticism or family member, and leave them battered on the floor.
“You don’t have to worry about me, cousin,” she said, her voice low. “I know when to keep my mouth shut. If only you could hear me in our political study class. I think I’ve memorized more slogans than the Premier himself.” She lifted her chin defiantly. Her recklessness, her casualness with words, stunned him. His cousin had been this way ever since Swirl’s return.
But perhaps, he thought, this bravado was not for him but for Kai.
The sun touched everything now. They attempted to find refuge on a bench under a flowering pear tree. They sat as if they were alone and self-contained, the joy of only a few minutes ago dissolving. Perhaps it was the heat that made them quiet. Nobody stood nearby yet Sparrow felt the weight of someone, or some attentive presence. There was shouting in the distance, or maybe laughing.
“This morning,” Kai said, his voice barely audible, “the President of the Conservatory was in the newspapers. Did you read it? Liberation Daily has a full page on him. Wen Hui Bao, too. They say He Luting is anti-Party and anti-socialist, and that the most damaging accusations are coming from inside the Conservatory.”
“I thought you were practising all morning,” Zhuli said.
Kai paused. “I think that half my life might be spent running from one position to another until I trip and make a fatal mistake.”
“Have you been to Wuhan?” Sparrow asked, wanting to change the subject. He knew He Luting was under investigation, of course, but Kai’s words still chilled him.
“Forgive me, Teacher. I’m only a student and yet I feel that I can be very free with you. What did you ask me?”
“Would you like to go to Wuhan?”
“With you,” the pianist said.
“Yes. If you have time to spare during the break. The journey and my research would need three or four days, perhaps longer. I’m looking for an assistant, I’ve been commissioned by the Conservatory to gather—”
“Yes,” the pianist said.
“But I haven’t told you why.”
“I’ll go.”
Zhuli was hugging her violin case to her chest as if it concealed her. She refused to be a child and demand to go with them. She had her mother to think of, too. One day soon, she thought, she would play for her father, whose face she no longer recalled, but who used to sing, “Little girl, where are you going? Tell your father and he will take you. Tell your father and he will find a map, bring the tea, make the sun lift, and string the trees along the road.” Was it a poem, a story, or something he had composed? “Zhuli,” he would say, “little dreamer.” She let go of his voice and heard Ravel, the song itself, and her shoes scratching the pebbles each time she shifted her weight. She could see the light and the park and her cousin and Kai, but these pictures were only tenuously connected to the sound of the violin in her head. She heard it on waking and she knew it continued relentlessly through her sleeping hours; she, herself, came and went, not truly real, but the music had no beginning, it persisted, whether she was there or not, awake or not, aware or sleeping. She had accepted it all her life, but lately, she had begun to wonder what purpose it served. Prokofiev, Bach and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation and Chairman Mao occupied for others. Why was this? How had she had been made differently? After her parents had been taken away from Bingpai, she had been cut into an entirely different person.
There was a man limping across the park, one hand holding a rip in his shirt, as if this unsightliness bothered him more than the blood that ran down his face. People stared as he passed but no one spoke. Instead, a cold ring of quiet seemed to expand around this injured stranger, like water filling a plastic bag.
—