“He showed me his suitcase. Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts. What new movement could the Party proclaim that would bring these dead souls into line? What crackdown could erase something that was hidden in plain sight?
“ ‘This is my fate,’ Wen the Dreamer told me. ‘To escape and continue this story, to make infinite copies, to let these stories permeate the soil, invisible and undeniable.’
“And so he escaped,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “With the suitcase, I am sure, and convinced of his destiny.” He wiped his eyes. “I am glad Wen the Dreamer sent you to me, but I wonder which story he wanted you to hear. You know how it is: pull one thread, and the whole curtain unravels.”
“He wanted me to hear just the story you told,” Sparrow said. “I am sure of it.”
“There is the engineer we called Geiger, and also the former soldier, Paper Gun.” He waved at the air as if the two men were standing beside him. “I was given the name Comrade Glass Eye. Perhaps that is the lesson the Party wanted us to learn: in our basic needs — air, water, food, and shelter — nothing separates the doctor from the flea, the educated from the ignorant. So, in fact, I was re-educated after all. I learned this lesson all too well.”
Across the clear morning, Sparrow could see Kai bringing water to the garden, ladling it out with a small container.
“If you had to guess, where do you think my uncle might have gone?”
“Wen the Dreamer has no identity papers and he has, therefore, little room to manoeuvre.” The old man shook his head. “He is a refugee in his own country. There are two routes that I can see: either the northern journey of May Fourth into the desert, or across the ocean like Da-wei. Which would your uncle choose?”
“Neither. He will not leave my Aunt Swirl or Zhuli.”
“Agreed. Regardless of his trajectory, you will hear from him.”
“Yes,” Sparrow said. “He can’t prevent himself from putting pen to paper.”
The old man laughed. He seemed to emit light for a moment and then the light wavered and dimmed.
“Come,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “I think your friend has recovered from last night’s festivities. He is ready to continue playing music for us and I’m ready to rest my feet and close my eyes, bend my head, and listen attentively. I remember now that Wen the Dreamer always began his stories with the greeting, ‘Kàn guān. Dear listener.’ ”
—
That same day, while practising Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Zhuli could not stop thinking about her parents. Had Swirl and Big Mother Knife reached Gansu Province? What was the probability that her father would come across an altered copy of the Book of Records? It was as likely, Zhuli thought, as her being invited to play Prokofiev before Chairman Mao and the villagers of Bingpai.
She had been just a child then, only six years old, when she discovered the underground library. Sitting alone, frozen by the winter sun, she had seen a stranger emerging from the soil. His head had seemed to lift from the ground as if he were crawling out of his own grave. The stranger turned north, his long, baggy body melting into the trees. Zhuli had stood, peering after him. Was he an escaped convict or just a stranger passing through? Maybe it was the ghost of her great-grandfather, Old West.
Zhuli went to investigate. After the land reform had been achieved, after they had been assigned the mud brick house, Zhuli had been expelled from the village school. The child of a disgraced landlord, the peasants’ association decided, should study the textbook of the fields and the equations of the sky. Besides, she already knew how to read and should no longer take up precious space. With nowhere to go and no one to play with, Zhuli had tried to stay with her parents in the fields, but she got in the way of the plough and cut her feet on the sharp rice stalks. Her mother, exasperated, yelled at her to go home. She obeyed but inside the hut, the loneliness became unbearable.
Zhuli decided to investigate the spot where the old man had emerged. Crouching in the shade of a gnarled tree, she saw a clean, dark stone and, beneath it, flattened grass and a branch worn smooth: it was a handle. She lifted the trap door. There was a rope with knots. She was small and, even in her bulky, padded coat, climbed down easily.
In some ways, this hidden space was more comfortable than the bare room in which she lived with her parents. It was just below ground, as if a very large and well-made wooden box, a shipping container, had been buried with a living room inside it, like an afterlife for Old West. There was a cushioned chair large enough for six Zhulis, an imported kerosene lamp and a full case of oil, stacks and stacks of books, and a soft, woven mat on the floor. She lit one of the lamps and, pulling shut the trap door, glimpsed two musical instruments, a qin and an erhu, though she hadn’t known their names at the time. When she set it on her lap, the qin was heavy and cold. It had a creaking roughness and, at first, she simply sat with it and stared at the room which, in comparison to the mud house, seemed modern and strange. The crumbling books were from another age, they were literally from another continent, but the heavy qin felt alive. On her lap it seemed to breathe in and out, like the great-grandfather to whom it must have belonged.
Zhuli went down almost every day, even if only for an hour. Over an entire season, she tested the range of the qin’s five, battered strings. She did not know how to tune the instrument but quickly settled on a harmony that seemed to suit both the strings and herself. Later on, she learned that the classical guqin was associated with elderly scholars and erudite books (“With snakes, conservatives and reactionaries,” her classmates said) and it was true, Old West’s qin had made her feel part of a floating darkness. The sounds it made were otherworldly, and had more in common with punctuation than with words. At night, Zhuli slept curled up beside her mother, longing to be in the underground library. She needed to make sure the instrument was still breathing. Truly, it felt as if the old qin was her stronger, braver twin.
Spring was late that year and all the farmers and the hungry people were anxiously watching the ground. An otherwise kind boy named Lu saw her emerge from the soil, just as she had glimpsed the old man. That very day, the container was dug up and all the objects carted off. The books, the soft carpets and the cushioned chair were confiscated, proof that Old West’s descendants were biding their time and continued to conceal their wealth. Neighbours whom Zhuli knew, who always greeted her on the paths and sometimes gave her something small to eat, came and plastered the mud brick house with hastily written denunciations, the words so large they could be read from the road. She knew only a handful of characters, but she recognized the ones for girl/daughter 女 and sky 天, which had been linked together to form a single word, witch 妖 (yāo).
That evening, the little hut was very quiet. Zhuli asked her mother why the word yāo was written on their house. Her mother combed Zhuli’s hair and said it was nothing, a small disagreement with the neighbours and, anyway, what an odd word to recognize. Swirl did something she never did, she mixed a paste of herbs and eucalyptus oil and rubbed the mixture over Zhuli’s arms and legs, gently massaging her arms, legs, feet, fingers and even her toes. With every circular motion of her mother’s fingers, Zhuli disappeared piece by piece. She remembered the soothing warmth of the kang and her father’s suitcase with its dulled fabric and brass clasps, and a keyhole the size of her pinky. Once she had asked for the key but he said it didn’t exist.