Zhuli walked back to the Conservatory alone. Her cousin and Jiang Kai had gone ahead, the two of them serious as Soviet spies, leaning towards one another, the pianist’s hand on the small of Sparrow’s back, the place, she knew, Sparrow had sustained an injury. He worked on his compositions for eighteen hours a day. Often, she came home from the Conservatory to find him lying on the floor of his closet room, in terrible pain. She would massage the spasms in his back and scold him for working too hard. It was as if Sparrow feared all the music inside him would be shut off, like a tap gone dry. But, honestly, who had ever heard of a Sparrow without music?
Ahead of her, Kai turned, lifted one eyebrow and grinned at her. The pianist had the same open, honest smile as Premier Zhou Enlai. She imagined the coffin-sized room he lived in, the rough floors and rodents, and wondered how Kai had ever managed to learn piano if he had grown up in a destitute village outside of Changsha. What kind of strings could a village boy pull? The pianist was a bag of tricks, she concluded. He wore his rural background well, like a penny novel wrapped inside an elegant cover. When not smiling, though, he had a face that could only be described as vigilant.
Her violin case swung with the rhythm of her steps. A procession of carts passed, each one weighed down with oil drums, the drivers sweating ferociously as if they were pedalling up Mount Ba itself. At the corner of Huaihai Road, she saw Conservatory students fluttering around Yin Chai, who had the glazed expression of someone who had withstood hours of adoration. The prettiest one, Biscuit, carried a trophy of flowers. Empress Biscuit detached herself from the group, came over, and overwhelmed Zhuli with revolutionary slogans, inside of which was posed, like a bee sting, the line, I saw you leaving with handsome Jiang Kai! Zhuli blinked and said, “The sun of Mao Zedong gives new fervour to my music!” and clutched her violin to her chest. Biscuit looked at her knowingly. The beauty queen would never be a great violinist, Zhuli thought, side-stepping Biscuit’s velvety hair which curled in long arabesques against the wind. She hid the moon and shamed the flowers, as the poets said, but she played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.
She decided not to practise after all and ran abruptly into the road, hopping into a passing tram decorated with a banner that said, “Protect Chairman Mao!” It was so crowded, it squeezed even her envy out, so that when she entered the laneway off Beijing Road, she felt fine and light. Arriving home, she crossed the inner courtyard and entered the kitchen so unassertively that she caught her mother in the act of pocketing a spoon. Startled, Swirl turned. A handful of dried mung beans showered to the ground. Zhuli went to the table, clapped a mosquito between her hands and pretended she had witnessed nothing.
“Ma,” she said, turning back, “I’m perfecting Ravel’s Tzigane. It’s incredibly difficult.”
“Ravel,” her mother said, pleased.
“Shall I play it for you soon?”
“Yes, my girl.” Her mother smiled and a few more beans clicked and clacked on the tiled floor.
Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday. She got a broom and quickly swept up the beans, rinsed them in the sink, and spread them to dry on a clean cloth.
“Ma,” she said, but her mother was now at the kitchen table. Zhuli went to her, wanting to ask forgiveness for the disrespectful thoughts in her head, but then she noticed the two travelling bags on the floor, and the papers, maps and notebooks on the table.
Zhuli picked up one of the notebooks, opened it and began to read. Her mother’s handwriting covered page after page: persistent, balanced, sharp. Zhuli recognized the story right away, Da-wei’s radio station in the desert, May Fourth’s journey into the western borderlands, and the great revolution that had overtaken their lives. The tantalizing, epic Book of Records.
“You’re making a new copy,” Zhuli said. “Ma?”
“I finally finished it this morning.”
Her mother drew a widening circle on the biggest map. “Your father’s camp was here,” Swirl said, “but if he returned to Gansu Province I think he would avoid this region…”
Zhuli could not follow her mother’s trajectories. They criss-crossed and overran one another like the interlacing of a bird’s nest.
“So I should begin my search here,” her mother concluded. And her fingertip came to rest on an open place.
Zhuli wanted to take her mother’s frail hand, lift it off the map, and hide it in her own. She wanted to take the map and burn it in the stove. “How would you do that?” she said quietly.
“Your aunt and I will go together. We travelled the length of this country when we were young.”
“It’s not the same as it was.”
“True. Back then, there was the war against Japan, famine, and then the Nationalists bombed the Yellow River and terrible flooding came…”
“That’s not what I meant,” Zhuli said. “The neighbourhood grandmas will talk and the public security men will break down the door again. They’ll say you’re siding with a convicted rightist. And then what?” She wanted to say, but did not, How can you even think of leaving me again? Don’t I matter? Isn’t there any part of you for me and not for him?
“Big Mother will be teaching a new model opera in Gansu Province,” Swirl said. “Since she’s leader of the Song and Dance Troupe, she arranged for me to accompany her. She already told the neighbours she’s going to handle my resurrection back into society. She told them that once I had lived in a Gansu mud hut for a few weeks, I would overcome the wrongs I committed and the idiocies of my youth.”
Her mother reached out, hesitantly, to touch the long ends of Zhuli’s hair. Her eyes were forthright and calm. “Foolish girl,” she said softly, teasingly. “I’ve already been to the sea and back. This is only a small journey.” Her mother’s grey shirt and pants were ironed and clean, proper and unassuming, but there was a look in her mother’s eyes that had nothing to do with propriety and obedience. There was no resignation, only a sharp knife in a pool of water. Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.
“Ma,” Zhuli said, “please let me go with you.” Even as she said it, she knew she didn’t want to leave. “Big Mother can arrange it, can’t she?”
Her mother said nothing as if the thought itself was not worth hearing.
Instead, Swirl picked up the copy she had made of Chapter 17 of the Da-wei novel and began to ramble like the evening newsreader. She would make further copies of all the chapters, she said, each one bound into a separate notebook, thirty-one notebooks in all. But in each one, the text would be marginally altered, and the date of copying added. They would use the same code as the original author, folding locations and information into the names of Da-wei and May Fourth, clues meant only for Zhuli’s father, changes he would recognize immediately as not belonging to the original Book of Records.
“But what location?” Zhuli asked. “It’s too dangerous for him to come here.”
Her mother had thought of everything. The location belonged to a third party, the Lady Dostoevsky, who had been resurrected by the Party and was now living in Gansu Province, working for a plant and flower clinic.
“She has given the clinic a wondrous name,” her mother said. “She calls it Notes from the Underground. The idea suddenly came to me. I remembered how Da-wei sent messages to his lover over the radio broadcasts, through the public airwaves. Hiding in plain sight. Big Mother and I will keep making copies as we go, and we’ll scatter them all over the Northwest. She’s already used the Conservatory’s machine to make a dozen copies of Chapter 17, your father’s favourite chapter. Wen might go without food for five days, but he can’t resist the literature section of the bookshops. We added the date, you see? As soon as your father sees it, he’ll know the message wasn’t left by the author. The message could only have come from us.”