“Why did you agree to go the study group?” Sparrow heard the change in his voice, as if he was accusing her, and was appalled by himself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because when Kai came this morning, I saw that you were happy. I was glad to see you joyful. And Kai is our friend, isn’t he? Because I know, of course I see things too. I think…there is nothing to say.”
“You are not to practise in the Conservatory. I’m sure everything will return to normal but…you mustn’t do anything to attract their attention.”
“Do?” she said. “What should I do? Sparrow, do you know that Kai is a Red Guard now? I heard…he led the attack on Tofu Liu’s parents—”
“You imagined it.”
She stared at him, stunned. “How could I imagine something like that?”
“Kai was with me last night,” Sparrow said.
“Was he with you all evening?”
He lied to her, he did it without thinking. “Yes.”
She shook her head. “Tofu Liu saw him. And Kai was there at the Conservatory, when my classmates surrounded me.”
“No, it’s impossible.”
“Well,” she said. Disappointment surfaced in her eyes and then was pushed away. “If it’s impossible, then I must be mistaken.”
Did Sparrow believe that she would make things up? Had she ever done such a thing before? Zhuli’s thoughts twisted uselessly. Yesterday afternoon, her classmates had stared at her with contempt, as if she were a traitor. The change had seemed to happen in a moment. Or maybe, she thought, the feeling had been inside them all along, but she had not understood it until she saw it in Kai’s expression.
Beside her, Sparrow said nothing.
The children of class enemies are the enemies of the People! This daughter of a rightist is a dirty whore! Two months ago she knew she might have been swayed to denounce her own mother, she might have done anything to protect her place at the Conservatory. If they took music away from her, she would die. Yes, that was how perfidious the children of class enemies were! Her parents, meanwhile, the convicted traitors, had never implicated or denounced anyone. What did it mean? The People should come first, above family and self, above petty concerns like attachment and music and love. No more Prokofiev, no more Ravel, no more of the world instilled in her by Bach, no more Western music meant to be passively received. What were the words that Prokofiev had set to music? “Believe, comrades, and it will come to pass.” We must struggle, Chairman Mao had said. We are heirs to a better world. Equality will protect us. Equality will make us powerful.
She broke the silence. “I am not well, Sparrow. Something is wrong in my head. I must have imagined everything.”
“Dear Zhuli, go and rest. I’ll wake you if something happens.”
Dear, she thought. How brave he was, to use such nostalgic language. If she truly wanted to protect her family, shouldn’t she turn herself in? But for what crime? Her thoughts frightened her, they made no sense.
The shouting had decreased in volume. The students had turned towards another street.
“These are professors’ lodgings,” Zhuli said. “Even if they don’t come here tonight, we’re like eggs in a nest.”
Sparrow could not help but notice how Zhuli clutched her violin. He had an image of Wen the Dreamer, holding the battered suitcase, names sliding out like bits of clothing. He tried to clear his thoughts. Zhuli was only a child and children would not be harmed. Children, the Chairman said, carried the seeds of revolution.
—
In the pre-dawn darkness, Zhuli went to the Conservatory to return the score of Beethoven’s “Emperor.” The library was locked and she found herself inside Room 103, a room she had never entered before without her violin. There was no one around. She closed the door, sat down on the floor and rested for a long time. She had a desire to stop time moving so quickly. The previous night, Zhuli had stayed awake rereading Chairman Mao’s talk on art and literature, but each time she felt a truth might be appearing, it muddied and broke away. The Chairman’s words were elegant, perfectly sharp, but when they touched her thoughts, they became crooked. Unable to sleep, she had written a long self-criticism, but it was not the kind that the Party demanded. Instead, the same reactionary words kept rising to the surface and dirtying the page.
“Who am I at the base of things?”
“Do I have the ability to change?”
Say all you know, the Chairman had written, and say it without reserve.
“But there is more and more that I question! I’m afraid to hear what I think. I know that the Party is right in all things. I say it is right but even the simplest truths don’t seem like truths at all.”
We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the old world, we are also good at building the new.
“What if the new is nothing but a virus of the same sickness? And what about devotion, what about duty and filial love? Must everything that is old be contemptible? Weren’t we also something before?”
Why are you defending a musical culture that is not your own?
She pinched her hands and the pain shot all the way to her neck. “Enough of these thoughts! They’re all useless because at the base somewhere I know what the Party says is right. Only I’m so selfish, so selfish…”
She heard scuffling nearby. Zhuli stood. A low moaning was coming from the cellars in the basement. Had someone been down there this entire time? Her body began to tremble. No, she told herself, her mind was troubled, she’d hardly slept. Still, she heard someone moaning in pain. Room 103 struck her, for the first time, as an echo of the underground library. Zhuli left the room, rushed up the stairs and out into the warm air. It was still early, still dark outside, as if the counting of time had paused and was only now being restarted again.
She had the family’s oil and grain coupons in her pocket and she walked in a daze, her hand over the opening, hiding them and protecting them. Since Big Mother and Swirl’s departure, it had been her responsibility to pick up the rations.
The queue for oil had already reached Julu Road. When she saw how long the line would take, her distraction turned into guilt. She should have come here first thing. It had been a mistake to go to the Conservatory, she had known better and yet, once again, she had followed stupidity and selfishness. She took her place at the end of the line, behind a girl who wore nothing on her feet and whose eyes were squeezed shut. The cut of her hair was as blunt as an anvil. Nobody spoke. Every building was shrouded in red banners. A broken chair lay in the road beside a length of rope caked in what looked like ink. Three phrases swung together in her thoughts: Party-mindedness, people-mindedness, ideological content. It is my thinking, Zhuli thought. Everything correct becomes something poisoned. If only I could quiet my thoughts. She felt as if she hadn’t closed her eyes in days.
Distribution wouldn’t begin for another hour. Perhaps, if she was lucky, she would reach the front of the line by noon. If they ran out of oil, she would come again the next day. She would give in, she would forget the Conservatory and walk away. A weight lifted from her shoulders at this thought. “Yes,” she said, startling the girl beside her. She was addressing these thoughts to Kai, but the thoughts no longer seemed like hers. “There is always tomorrow and the day after and the day after. It is not too late to reform and grow.”