At some point, he must have fallen asleep. He woke up to find Kai’s arm around him, protecting him and the erhu from the old lady who had the concentrated heft of a bowling ball. Inch by inch, she was appropriating the seat, and at the same time cracking sunflower seeds in her teeth. Sparrow tried to return to the dream he’d just awoken from, which involved Herr Bach seated before a comically small pianoforte, playing No. 13 of the Goldberg Variations in order to demonstrate a particular subtlety of strict counterpoint. The composer’s name brought together the words bā (longing) and hè (awe). Bach’s face was as solemn as the moon. In the sticky, sweaty rocking of the bus, music rippled in his memory as he walked on stepping stones marked bā, hè, bā, hè, Sparrow fell asleep again.
Kai woke him in Suzhou. They alighted, as if drunk, from the bus. Inside Sparrow’s rucksack, the thirty-one notebooks of the Book of Records (all mimeographed except for the hand-copied Chapter 17) elbowed against his back, as if he were carrying Da-wei and May Fourth on his shoulders. They sprinted to catch the bus to Nanjing, which had just begun to pull away. The bus groaned forward and the ticket taker waved them up to the roof to find a space among the chickens, the students and the baggage.
Kai climbed up first, then turned, reached down and grabbed Sparrow’s arm just as the bus was picking up speed. When Sparrow looked dizzily up, all he saw was the pianist’s earnest face against the white sky, and then, panicking and holding on for dear life, he was hoisted up beside Kai. The students on the roof made space for the bewitching Kai, who naturally took centre stage. The pianist could speak with both the quickstep of the city and the balladry of the countryside, he was a one-man Book of Songs and Book of History. Kai told a sly joke that made the boys howl and the girls smile knowingly. The grip of Kai’s hand on his had left a bruise on Sparrow’s skin and it ached to the teetering of the bus. “Teacher,” the pianist said, touching his arm briefly, “won’t you play a song to light our way?” A teasing affection gleamed in Kai’s eyes and made the girls draw closer. “This comrade,” he told them, “is our nation’s most celebrated young composer! Believe me, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your lives.”
Sparrow ignored him, tuned his erhu and swept them into “Fine Horses Galloping,” which got the boys whooping and the girls singing. A red-cheeked beauty with sparkling eyes somehow ended up at his knee. When he finished she asked him to play it all over again, which he did before segueing into “The Night of Shanghai.” As he played, he remembered standing on the round tables of the teahouses, singing “Jasmine” to the rattling of coins and the offerings of tea and melon seeds, his mother and Aunt Swirl harmonizing with him, back when he first imagined that all the world was a song, a performance or a dream, that music was survival and could fill an empty stomach and chase the war away.
The students sang and shouted, and the driver thundered at them to keep it down, and the passengers below yelled cào dàn (Satan) and sent other furious epithets up at them, but these only dissipated harmlessly away. Kai suggested Sparrow play “Bird’s Eye View,” which was apt and also full of melancholy. He did, and Kai sang, and by the end of the tune, the affectionate girl at Sparrow’s side had tears in her velvety eyes, and he thought he could hear old people sobbing down in the belly of the bus.
The afternoon passed and twilight descended, slowly at first, then ever more quickly. Along the motorway, towns jumbled out into smaller and smaller buildings until finally the land won out, ever vast and golden and infinite. Now and then, a handful of passengers would leap off and someone else would climb up. In the fading light, he saw Kai watching him, and he felt the pianist’s hand on his shoulder, then the back of his neck, then along the thinness of his spine. The girl was pressed against Sparrow’s other arm and the clean sweetness of her hair radiated up a pensive fragrance, hopeful as a bouquet of winter flowers. The Party said that desire, like intellect and skill, was a tool for struggle. But love, if it served the smaller self before the greater one, the individual before the People, was a betrayal of revolutionary ideals, of love itself.
He watched the lowlands disappear, giving way to higher altitudes and drier winds. Quilts were unrolled, thermoses opened and wisps of steam plaited together and curled into the night sky. Sparrow slept under the protection of stars and a half moon, hidden by a cover he shared with Kai, in the warmth of the pianist’s arms.
—
They passed small rivers and one-lane overpasses and finally descended into a mid-sized town that looked exactly like other mid-sized towns. Layers of dust had covered them both and turned them mirroring shades of mahogany. It was early morning. While they waited on a concrete bench for the next bus, Kai told him stories of his village outside of Changsha. “My hometown is nearby, only a few hours away by bicycle. But if you visited, Teacher Sparrow, you’d think you’d gone back a hundred years or more. The same faces appear and reappear, they return with every generation. An old farmer might be reborn as his neighbour’s infant, a wealthy landowner might come back as an indentured farmer. In villages like mine, individuals pass away, but generations and routines cycle on forever.”
The pianist shifted his rucksack, looked out into the steady traffic of bicycles and wobbling trucks, and a storm of swallows that had gathered on the opposite bench.
“But one day, when my father himself was a child,” Kai continued, “a new school opened in the next town. The school was run by a trio of former shopkeepers who had been converted to Christianity by Jesuit missionaries. These three oiled their hair and wore black cassocks so long they swept the ground. They were pious men and also entrepreneurs. As soon as they arrived in town, they took over two shops and converted them into a church and a school. Instead of tuition fees, they asked the farmers to pay them in vegetables and grain, in labour to maintain the buildings and harvest the land, and in faith to their god, who seemed to be a well-fed baby from Tianjin, carried in the arms of an empress, and swaddled in celebratory clothes. People admired the baby because he was a cheerful god of prosperity. And every week, the three priests would gather the faithful in their church and play music on a small piano that, they said, had come to China two hundred years ago on a ship brought by Italians who had floated up the Yangtze River. But how this musical instrument went from the Italians to the three priests, no one knew.
“My father,” Kai added, “was a village schoolteacher himself who farmed a few acres of land. He sent me to the priests when I was very small because he wanted to find out more about this piano. Actually, we were believers in a way. We had complete faith in the things the priests provided: food, loans, education and medicine.
“And so I went and studied with all my heart,” Kai said. “I wasn’t the cleverest child in my class, but I was sensitive. So desperately did I want to escape my village that I even felt sorry for the grass that grew in that blighted place. I assumed that every village on earth must look like this, and so I fantasized about going far away, to the moon or another planet. The three priests, meanwhile, mistook my desire to change my life for authentic faith, that is, a child’s pure longing for the sacred. They embraced me as one of their own. When I was six years old, they began to give me lessons on the piano. I don’t know how they really acquired these instruments, but they had enough to form a chamber ensemble. They also had a good library. I learned to play a little bit of everything, violin and viola, organ, flute, even the horn, but I always went back to the piano. The keys felt like a part of my body. The piano, I thought, came from that outer, better world, from the sky and not from the dirt.