“I’m talking to you, you little slut!” They kept shouting. Her head was pulled back again. “How did this dirty whore slip through?” “Confess who you are!” They were screaming through their loudspeakers right into her ears as if they wanted to deafen her. They slapped the side of her head over and over. Is it a crime to be myself? Is it a crime to disbelieve? She wanted to weep at her own slowness, her own naïveté. The ink drying on her face made the skin tight and painful. All the other women were confessing to something. Zhuli seemed to be the only one still kneeling. She knew she was guilty but she could not confess. Around her, the crowd gave the impression of expanding and rising in exultation. “Open your mouth, you demon!” More slaps, and now they kicked her, pulled her upright again, and now they tied her arms behind her so that her wrists were high up, above her shoulders, and her head was nearly on the ground. “Hours of practice,” Zhuli thought deliriously. “I have practised and practised. I have memorized thousands of hours of music, and what will this be? A tiny pearl of time soon to be dissolved.” Zhuli could not hear. She saw faces all around her, she was aware of movement without noise. They seemed to think she was useless, an imbecile, and they turned their attention to the woman beside her who was crying so hard she could no longer hold herself up. Pity overwhelmed Zhuli and she saw darkness behind the woman. That is the place I must get to, she thought. But paint, or was it ink, and sweat had gotten into her eyes and she could not wipe them clean. It was unbearably hot. They would be back for her but she could hear only murmuring, a quiet, and it protected her. “I am ready now,” she thought, “to bring all these flowers for…I will find all the flowers, even if I must steal them from the hands of our Great Leader, I will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She had given every bit of her soul to music. The words of Goethe’s Faust returned to her: How great a spectacle! How great…But that, I fear / Is all it is. The quiet would show her the way out. Silence would expand into a desert, a freedom, a new beginning.
—
She became aware of movement and felt there was a great deal of space around her, a darkness that she took for asphalt, the road, or nighttime. Where were her arms? They seemed to have detached from her body and fallen away. “My fingers have gone to gather my hair,” she thought, wanting to smile, “they have gone to pick up my beautiful hair.” It was useless to try to open her eyes. They were crusted shut and she had nothing to hold on to but a stabbing pain that seemed to come from deep in her lungs. Piano music came, unidentifiable. How near it was but no, the music was a prank. Who played the piano in times like these? “Oh,” she thought as a trickle of water touched her eyes and then her lips, “my good hands have brought me water.” She heard an echoing and then it was as if the air changed pitch, a fog gave way to rain, rain shaded into tone, tone into voices. And then one voice in particular, which she knew immediately and impossibly to be Kai. “No,” she thought, the pain in her lungs increasing, “it is not good to fall into his hands.” Again the sensation of movement. Then the road came away from her skin. Kai was with her. At the bottom of all these tangled impressions she glimpsed a changed idea, another way of loving someone that she had not experienced before, an attachment like that to a brother, to a friend, to a lover who could never be her lover, of a musical soulmate, a companion who might have been a lifelong collaborator. “It is a great pity,” she thought, “that we will never have the chance to play Tzigane together because we brought something to it that had never been heard before. David Oistrakh himself would have recognized us; it is the truthfulness and the shame, no, the solitude, that comes from being at odds with oneself. It is loneliness. Only that, Kai,” she thought. Yes, if only it were Kai.
“Yes, Zhuli,” he said. “The Red Guards have all gone now.”
There was no more time. She was moving and yet she was still on the road. She was kneeling and yet she was lying in a dark, humid room. She heard Ba Lute, she heard Flying Bear crying, and Kai saying that two of the women targeted in the struggle session were still on the road, they were dead. One, a professor of mathematics at Jiaotong, had been dragged along the pavement for a kilometre. Zhuli pushed the noise out, it was coming at her not through her ears, but through a breeze against her arms, her hands. Someone washed her, she knew it could only be Sparrow. She knew she was safe and could now open her eyes if she chose to, but she did not choose to. Silence had come to her. It did not try to connect all its pieces, to pretend they were part of the same thing. It didn’t need to pretend. Silence saw everything, owned everything, eventually took everything.
Red Guards came to the house. She heard them coming nearer and nearer, they came in and things fell down, more shouting, they saw her and said they would come back. Someone was crying. It was the neighbour, Mrs. Ma, she cried, “Shame, shame!” but at whom? Zhuli didn’t know, she was afraid to guess. Shame was a corkscrew inside her, winding together the selfishness, the frivolity, the hollowness of what she was, until there was no more possibility of change.
In the next existence, Zhuli decided, there would be more colours than in the human world, there would be more textures and varieties of time. This would be the world of Beethoven as he sat with his back to the audience, when he understood that sound was immaterial, it was nothing but an echo, the true music had always been inside. But take away music, take away words, and what would persist? One of her ears had been damaged. She longed for her mother and father. How brightly the core of herself flickered before her, just out of reach. What are you, she asked. Where are you?
She sat up and realized it was night. She sat up again and again, imagining herself pushing aside the sheet, walking to the doorway, to the outer room, to the fresh air outside.
—
Sparrow heard his cousin waking. He had fallen asleep in a chair beside her bed. She had already left the room and turned down the hallway before he fully opened his eyes. He could not move. She would see the posters that were drying on the kitchen table. Da Shan and Flying Bear had been forced to criticize Zhuli, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, and these denunciations would be pasted up in the morning. “Call her the daughter of rightist filth,” Ba Lute had instructed. “You have to. Just write it down. Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing, only words.”
Da Shan smudged the ink, and his father threw out the poster and made him do it again.
“Da Shan,” he said, “if you don’t denounce Zhuli, they’ll only make it worse for her. They’ll turn around and says she’s a demon, that she infiltrated our lives. Let them humble us, if that’s what they want. Isn’t it better to be humbled? Do you want your poor father, your brothers, to lose their lives?”
Trembling, the teenager dipped his brush. Carefully, he wrote Zhuli’s name.
Ba Lute had now been summoned to the Conservatory twice, where the struggle sessions had lasted a full twelve hours. Their neighbour, Mr. Ma, had disappeared, and so had Zhuli’s teacher, Tan Hong. “The criticism I receive is very light, compared to the others,” Ba Lute said, when he returned. He had bruises all over his body. One eye was swollen shut and his face was bloodied and lopsided, but his accusers, his own pupils at the Conservatory, had left his hands alone. People who had been labelled rightists in earlier campaigns, even those who, like Swirl, had been rehabilitated, were far less fortunate.