—
The sun was still low and the town misty when the three of them climbed onto Jian’s moped, a vehicle allocated to him by the town planning office. They flew along a paved road that gradually broke down into stone, then gravel, then white dust, as if they were moving through time, to an age before stones and cities, or perhaps to an era in the future. Or this is how Sparrow felt with Kai seated behind him, the pianist’s hands on Sparrow’s waist, holding on against the force of their speed.
Initially, he worried that Jian would not see vehicles, plough animals or bicycles approaching from the left, and he committed himself to keeping watch, but as the town shrank and the sky brightened, he began to feel as if nothing bad could happen to them. Jian was wearing a cap with furred earflaps, one of which was pinned up, the other flapping freely in the wind, so he seemed truly one-winged and folkloric. At length, Jian turned onto a narrow road heading east and navigated them towards daybreak, past a string of houses, down a mangy dirt lane, arriving finally at a mud brick house with asymmetrical gables. They came to a stop.
A wiry man of indiscernible age, wearing ill-fitting clothing and holding a watering can, was standing inside a patch of dust-covered vegetables. He set the can down and came forward to meet them. Jian hailed him with, “Long live Chairman Mao!” and introduced Sparrow and Kai as the celebrated musicians they had discussed the previous night. The wiry man nodded. “You’ve suddenly materialized,” said Comrade Glass Eye, “like the travelling musical troupes who visited in the first years of our great Republic.” Even his voice was thin, as if his vocal cords were made of reeds. He studied them with both lightness and wariness.
Sparrow reached into his bag and withdrew a bulky package. He presented their host with a carton of Front Gate cigarettes, a bottle of cognac and a bag of White Rabbit sweets, which Ba Lute had given him to ease his journey through the province, calling them the new currency of the Republic.
“Gifts for Comrade Glass Eye,” Sparrow said, trying not to drop the bottle which was sliding out from between his fingertips.
The man’s head bobbed as he graciously accepted the gifts. “Very few people know me by that name,” he said. “Locally, I’m called Ai Di Sheng, after Thomas Edison, of course, because of my experiments with electricity. The villagers mean it as a joke, but a friendly joke. Sometimes the children and the drunkards call me Teacher Suiren, the fabled creator of fire. I guess I have been called many things. My workshop is just over here. Come in, please.”
He turned and began walking quickly towards the door beneath the second gable, the gifts rustling against his oversized shirt. Sparrow had to jog to keep up. Quietly, Comrade Glass Eye said to him, “Who instructed you to search for me by that name?”
“My uncle, known as Wen the Dreamer.”
The man showed no expression but kept on walking, balancing his gifts.
A wooden door opened without a creak or complaint and then a lamp hissed on although the man had touched nothing. Sparrow, Kai and Jian followed him inside. They dodged an enormous glass fishing buoy, climbed three steps, and entered a room with a single long table and a wall of shelves. Wires of light began to gleam, as if awoken by their movements. Comrade Glass Eye put his gifts down. He gestured towards the full yet uncluttered room and said, “You are welcome to look around.”
“Teacher,” Kai said, “is your main interest light?”
“It was,” the man said. “But when I returned from re-education, I discovered that my supply of copper wires was gone. During the Great Leap Forward, people broke down my door and carried away all the metal. You remember the slogan, ‘Struggle to produce 10.7 million tonnes of steel.’ When Chairman Mao instructed the villages to industrialize, my neighbours discovered all my bits and pieces, even my voltage meter, my collection of batteries, pinhole cameras and metal coils, not to mention my cooking pots and metal spoons, and fed them to the smelter that you’ll see if you walk fifty paces to the east of here. They managed to produce a surprising quantity of steel but, sadly, none of it was useable.” He shrugged and one of the electric lights fizzled, dimmed and then gleamed brightly again. “Upon my release, my neighbours all came and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame, Teacher Edison, you weren’t here to help us fulfill our steel quota?’ And then I was glad that I hadn’t been present to hand over all my spatulas and wires, as well as my mother’s wedding ring and the German stein my father brought from Düsseldorf many years ago, as well as my bicycle. Sometimes it is better not to say goodbye.”
The man paused for breath and to consider the long table, which held only a few items. “Come and look at my eyes,” he said.
He lifted out a cabinet, set it before them, and slid open a drawer that curved to the side like a hidden wing. Laid out on a notched paper surface, in even rows of eight, were eyes. Another light crackled on automatically. The eyes were ordered in a spectrum from black to chestnut irises, each with a subtle interweaving of lines, fissures and depths. They were hollow half-spheres made to fit, the man said, over the non-working eye, or over a sphere which had been implanted in the socket.
“These are for the right side,” he said. He slid open the second drawer which extended in the opposite direction. Forty further glass eyes appeared. “And these are for the left. Each one is paired to another, but I prefer to store them separately.”
Sparrow inched closer, hypnotized by the play of colours and the unreal, discomfitting feeling of the eyes moving over him.
“It seems like yesterday,” said Jian, who had been silent until now, “that I first met Teacher Ai Di Sheng, in this very room. I had lost my eye when my best friend, in a regrettable moment, punched me in the face. How could I lose my eye over something so inconsequential? Afterward, I couldn’t eat or sleep properly, and when I looked at my reflection all I saw was the empty socket, as if my entire self was being funnelled into that small, ugly opening. All night I would sit in my dark room and play my violin and its voice was the only thing that comforted me. Only music could express my pure feeling. I was broken by the loss of that eye.
“My best friend, who had hit me unintentionally and who also felt shame when he looked at my face, discovered Teacher Edison. So, one day, I found my way here. We sat at this table, face to face, and we spoke about vision, one-sidedness and the double nature of life. He asked me whether a glass eye would be for myself or for my best friend; in other words, did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me? Well, I was very depressed and both perspectives struck me as equally valid. After all, when I remember my past, I see myself as if from the outside, I perceive myself as another person might. So we came to the conclusion that eyes are not one-sided. Teacher Edison lectured me for a long time. He said that a glass eye could not be a replacement for the lost one, but rather a new addition, neither a blindfold nor a seeing eye, but a painted mirror…‘Please!’ I said, ‘I don’t care what it is…if you can help me you must! I feel as if I’ve been cut in two.’ And so, over many days, he painted my first prosthetic. It was chestnut brown with flecks of orange and a hint of gold, which he said was the nature of my seeing eye. One day, on a sunny morning just like today, we put it in for the first time. After the long wait and my impatience, I refused to look in the mirror. I was afraid of the devil I might see! What if my reflection turned out to be a monster, a new self even more hideous than before? But he ignored my tears and fixed the eye in place.”