Around her, people, buildings, objects all appeared disproportionately large, not only their substance but their shadows too. Had there ever been such a light-filled July? She saw now that she was standing beside a wall covered in posters. “Denounce the…” “Destroy the…” “Rise up and…eradicate…shame.” The words, written in colossal characters of red ink, buzzed in her thoughts. “Bombard the headquarters!” It sounded like a game that Flying Bear and Da Shan had invented. How odd it must feel to write violent words in such orderly calligraphy. Zhuli shook the thought away. Dissonance required as precise a technique as beauty. In her mind, Prokofiev’s libretto kept repeating: The philosophers have tried in different ways to explain the world; the point is to change it. Prokofiev quoted Marx, the Red Guards quoted Chairman Mao, everyone shouted borrowed ideas, her classmates memorized the Chairman’s slogans and adopted his poetry as their own. So we are not so different from one another after all, Zhuli thought, except that I speak in the language of Bach and the musical ideas of Prokofiev but still, none of us knows the true nature of our voices, no matter the cause, none of us speaks with our own words. At the core, is there only desire but no justice? All we’ve learned since the fall of the old dynasties is how to amplify the noise.
This noise was splitting inside her now. She heard Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3, as if from the air itself. Her own voice wept, “There is always tomorrow and the day after. It must not be too late.”
The line nudged forward.
—
Zhuli had nearly reached the head of the line. Each time she saw another person leaving, their full quota of rations in their exultant hands, she felt increasingly giddy. She allowed herself to count the people in front of her. Eighteen. It was midday, the shade had long retreated and, in the glare, the buildings were dissolving into watery reflections. She stepped to the side and peered ahead. Seventeen. The pavement had a dulled to grainy whiteness. There was a growing disturbance behind but Zhuli, focused only on obtaining the rations, didn’t turn. Voices chafed, followed by a woman’s fearful answer, a sagging E minor tone. She was easily drowned out by taunts. Still, Zhuli wouldn’t turn. Ahead of her the queue had begun to shift and in her exhausted thoughts, she saw the line as if from above, a millipede straining its tiny head forward. Zhuli was up against the barefoot girl in front of her, and when the girl turned, Zhuli turned as well, as if they were joined. She saw a woman being pulled from the lineup. The woman was her mother’s age. A Red Guard, a tall, spindly girl, was pushing down on the back of the woman’s neck as if the woman were an ox.
The woman was wearing a pale blouse and a navy skirt that fell below her knees. It must be her clothing, Zhuli thought dully, that had attracted the fury of the Red Guards. “Comrades, look at this trash!” the tall girl shouted, dragging the woman along the line. The girl was yelling so loudly her pink mouth seemed to swallow her face. Zhuli fought the urge to giggle, to dissolve in skittishness, to turn away and hide her shock, but just at that moment the girl pushed the woman straight towards her. “Slap her insolent face!” the girl screamed. Zhuli froze. “Slap her!” the girl shouted. Someone next to Zhuli reached out and gave the woman a stinging slap. The sound, or was it the echo, was soft and drawn out. The woman’s face was hidden by her dark hair which had come loose from its elastic, and then her head was yanked back and Zhuli saw blood on the woman’s mouth, both full and delicate. The woman, she thought dully, was being punished because of the desire, the degeneracy, inside her. “You, Comrade!” the girl cried. Zhuli lifted her eyes. “Teach this whore a lesson!” Someone very near, a man, was speaking in her ear, “Go ahead, don’t be afraid. We all have lessons to learn, don’t hesitate!” The woman was so close to Zhuli she could see the trembling of her eyelids and new droplets of blood starting to form. The girl was screaming words that made no sense. “Where have I put the ration coupons?” Zhuli thought, perplexed. “Has the line moved? I don’t want to lose my place. I’ve been waiting such a very, very long time.” She lifted her right hand but nothing happened. “Go on,” the man urged. Softly, so softly: “What’s wrong? Don’t hesitate!” More and more people pressed towards them. The woman was suddenly yanked away. Zhuli’s hand remained open, as if she was waiting to catch something in the air. “Little capitalist spy,” the girl was saying. “Stinking whore!” The line was running forward. Someone appeared in the corner of her eye with an unthinkably large bag of flour. Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a plane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late.
“Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered. “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”
Was it the little girl with no shoes? But when she turned, she saw only a press of bodies and no sympathetic face. The queue no longer existed and had been reshaped by the crowd. Where were her ration coupons? Had somebody pulled them from her hand? No, they were still here, tucked in the pocket of her shirt. She felt nauseated and knew she would vomit. Where was the woman? What hideous flaw had they seen inside her? The crowd seemed to swell and hide her, separating her from the hysterical Red Guards, the mob was both a terror and safety. In its frenzy it was evolving from hundreds of bystanders into a single entity, a snake with a thousand eyes twisting this way and that, searching with ever greater intensity, magnifying every speck of dirt within it. The snake wound its long neck around and around. When it found her, it lifted her right up and forced her through the crowd. “Don’t be afraid,” she thought, “this is not real.” She found herself standing in another line. Was that her voice crying out? There were a dozen people with her, old women, mothers and even girls, staring in shock. Red Guards swaggered around them, pushing them to their knees. Zhuli felt a shock of pain as she hit the concrete. Momentarily she became dissociated, she was watching from a few steps away, she was a part of the crowd and could see the targets and also herself. A girl, a different girl, was coming with scissors. She was yanking the heads back one by one and cutting off great clumps of hair. “Disgusting bitches,” the girl repeated. Zhuli re-entered herself and felt the blinding snap of the scissors and then an alien lightness as a swath of hair fell. “It’s nothing,” she thought, “only I must not lose the ration coupons. Ba Lute will be very angry if I let them fall from my pocket.” Other things began to happen. Someone said, “Oh, this is the violinist. The stuck-up bitch whose father is a counter-revolutionary.” They pulled her bag from her, turned it upside down and the Beethoven score slid out in a wild flutter of pages. She heard crying and begging, the rough splitting of clothing, but Zhuli focused on the papers. “I know this filth. Her mother is a rightist dog!” They were laughing at it, stomping on it, pretending to sing from it. People had arrived with dripping buckets and she saw streaks of black cutting through the air. They threw ink, or was it paint, on all the kneeling bodies. Zhuli bowed her head and it was as if the jeering and the spitting had broken the surface, everything was coming inside. The first three, five, seven slaps made her cry out in pain and anger but after that, there was a numbness as she began to lose feeling. Time expanded, just as it had in Bingpai when she was a child, and her father was kneeling in the centre of the room. She had wondered, then, why her father had not stood up. Why would they not let him rise? She thought of Ma and what passed from mother to daughter, from husband to wife, from one beloved to another, a bloodline, a touch, a virus. “I was the one who opened Old West’s library,” Zhuli thought, beginning to lose consciousness. “It was my mistake and it is destroying my parents’ lives. Every slap, kick and humiliation that I receive is one less for my mother. What am I inside? What is it they finally see?”