“There are more posters,” Kai said. “In the courtyard and on the gates.”
“But who is targeting them?” she said. She should have lowered her voice but she did not. “Why are they denouncing my uncle?”
Kai was already pushing back into the crush of people, some chanting, some grinning like opera-goers. Here were Biscuit and her Page-Turners, as Zhuli called them, and here was the string class as if they always travelled ensemble.
Zhuli said, “Ba Lute performed for Chairman Mao.”
Nobody seemed to hear her except Biscuit, who looked at Zhuli with unexpected kindness.
“My uncle was a hero at Headquarters,” Zhuli told her. “He led a battalion of the New Fourth Route Army.”
Biscuit blinked nervously and looked away.
Kai took her hand and pulled her behind him. At the end of the corridor, the noise lessened. How hot it was, how desperately humid, yet Kai’s hand was cool and dry. She clutched the handle of her violin case, stood very still and listened with all her strength, but under the bursts of contemptuous laughter she no longer heard the Debussy.
—
Outside, the posters were more precise and prescriptive. When Zhuli had arrived this morning, just before 6 a.m., the walls had been bare, so the posters must have been pasted up in broad daylight, with the approval of the class committees or even…Zhuli’s thoughts became confused. Big Mother Knife had been right. A new campaign was underway.
STAND UP AND REBEL! KILL THOSE WHO WOULD SABOTAGE OUR REVOLUTION. STAND UP AND BE FREE.
“It’s not just here,” Kai said as he led her through the east gate. “This morning there are denunciations at Jiaotong University, and even at the Beijing universities, at Tsinghua and Beida. They all say the same thing.”
On Fenyang Road, people flowed to work, talking, complaining, pulling children, weighed down by bags, water drums, instruments, birds, chairs, unidentifiable metal objects, pushed forward by hunger, routine, necessity, even joy. The air was sticky. Zhuli wanted to crouch down with her throbbing hands over her ears and block out the sun and the noise. No, she decided suddenly, her thoughts clearing. Those denunciations, those posters, could not be real.
“How was your trip to Wuhan?” She spoke the words casually, as if they had just now met on the street. “Sparrow looked exhausted when he got up this morning. And yet here you are, already hard at work!”
He looked at her steadily, as if trying to hear between the words. “I slept on the bus.”
“And did you and my cousin come home with recordings full of music?”
Kai still said nothing. He reminded her of a cat with one paw raised, about to touch the ground, momentarily confused.
“That was your mission, wasn’t it?” she reminded him. “To traverse the countryside, to record and preserve the folk songs of our motherland.” Whose words was she using, she wondered. She forced herself to look him in the eye.
“Oh,” he said, one hand shading his face from the sun. “We came back with three reels.”
She wanted to beg him to come away with her, to come and play for a few hours. Or to go to the music library and browse the old recordings, there was a Shostakovich string quartet she longed to hear. Instead she said carelessly, “I have to go. I left my scores in Room 103.”
“Forget them. Go home, Zhuli.”
“I’m no prodigy like you,” she said. “I don’t improve by merely wishing it.”
“This is the start of a new campaign. Don’t you understand?”
The sincerity in his eyes brought both hope and fury to her.
He said, “The Red Guards can turn your life to ashes. They will.”
Before I met you, Zhuli thought, I had no one to please but myself. Jiang Kai, you are as real and unreal as the shadow of an airplane. She wanted to ask Kai if he loved Sparrow for who he was, or if it was his talent that was the true attraction. Didn’t he understand that a gift like Sparrow’s could not be bought or borrowed, it could not be stolen? Did Kai love the person, or did he love what Sparrow’s music made him feel? Her own thoughts surprised and upset her. She nodded brightly. “Until they do, I can only practise.”
He smiled at her, in the way that Ba Lute sometimes smiled thinly at Flying Bear. Kai reached into his satchel and withdrew a sheaf of music. “Don’t be stubborn,” he said. “Take these.” She stared down. He had placed in her hands familiar pieces by the deceased composer Xian Xinghai, a hero of the Revolution.
In her bewilderment, she felt entirely alone. The concrete buildings, crowded roads and all the passersby seemed to move inside a light that didn’t reach her. “Jiang Kai,” she said spitefully, “now I understand. I’ll forget Prokofiev. I’ll play the ‘March of the Volunteers’ and ‘The Internationale’ for all eternity. The old world shall be destroyed. Arise, slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing. That should win me the Tchaikovsky Competition and please everyone, you most of all.”
There was his patronizing half-smile again. “Comrade Zhuli, don’t make the silly mistake of thinking your talent is enough.”
“My talent doesn’t concern me,” she said. “What I need to know is, will Sparrow’s talent protect him? That’s what you and I care the most about, isn’t it?”
Instead of speaking, he painstakingly tied up his bag, which was patched in both corners and on the strap. He should conduct, Zhuli thought, all his movements have the illusion of expressing so much.
She wanted to ask him how he could acquiesce on the surface and not be compromised inside. You could not play revolutionary music, truly revolutionary music, if you were a coward in your heart. You could not play if your hands, your wrists, your arms were not free. Every note would be abject, weak, a lie. Every note would reveal you. Or perhaps she was wrong and Kai was right. Maybe, no matter his or her convictions, a great musician, a true genius, could play any piece and be believed.
She wanted to put all these thoughts into questions but by the time she had recovered herself, Kai had turned and walked away.
The movement in the street rustled and shamed her; no one else had a moment to rest, to think, to be afraid. Yet here she was, with time on her hands. She looked down at the music he had given her, which she saw now had been transcribed for violin and copied out by hand. Midway through, the notes wobbled and tilted, as if running into the wind. It must have taken him hours. But why would Jiang Kai do such a thing for her? When did he have time?
She began walking, directionless, fearful that the posters trailed behind her like mud stuck to her shoes. The words: counter-revolutionary, monsters, blind feeling, false love, witch. Inside her head, Ravel’s Tzigane refused to be quiet. It billowed on and revealed itself as the composition of a madman. To escape, she rushed between the bicycles to Xiangyang Park. The grain and oil lineups snaked past her, and a line of grandmothers stood in studied silence, clutching their ration coupons. The sun was high now and the heat intolerable, but everyone seemed blank and unsweating. Of course, I will go back and find Kai and apologize, Zhuli thought, even though she kept walking. How many self-criticisms had she written? A thousand pages, two thousand? Yes, she was selfish and plagued by immoderate desires and yes, her love for music was a weakness. She had confessed these faults since she was eight years old, but she had stubbornly refused to purify her heart. Chairman Mao said, “To be aware of one’s own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them means taking a liberal attitude to oneself. These people talk Marxism but practise liberalism. Yes, this is how the minds of certain people work and they are extremely harmful to the revolutionary collective.” The park came like a sip of water. There was a shaded bamboo bench and she sat down, her violin case on her lap.