Twice, Sparrow had been taken away by a group of Red Guards. They had locked him in a storeroom at the Conservatory but nobody had come to criticize him or denounce him. Eventually the door was opened and he was sent away. It was as if he floated underwater, inside a bubble of air. On the streets, the students sang and wept and shouted their love. The targets who had been humiliated once were humiliated again and again, as if a familiar face elicited the most hatred, they were the ones to blame for the receding promise of modernity, the violent sacrifices of revolution, this malevolence that seemed to infect the very young. Only it was not malevolence, it was courage and they were loyal soldiers defending the Chairman. Sparrow had to protect Zhuli, he had to finding a hiding place, but where? His father had said the violence was most extreme at the universities. The radio proclaimed that, in Beijing, the writer Fou Lei, once celebrated for his translations of Balzac and Voltaire, was being subjected to daily struggle sessions alongside his wife. The family’s books had all been burned and the piano destroyed. Their son, the pianist Fou Ts’ong, had applied for and received political asylum in the West. The father, Fou Lei, the quiet traitor, the poisonous needle wrapped in a silk cover, was finally being called to account.
The morning grew hotter. When Sparrow woke again, Zhuli was sitting in bed, under the window. She had left a space for her mother, as if Swirl might arrive home at any moment. With her hair cut off, she looked even younger than she was.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can go back to sleep.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” He sat up in his chair, rubbed his face, pushing his uneasy dreams away. “No, I was only thinking.”
“I’m fine now, and I know when you’re telling fibs.”
He smiled. One hand drifted up to the opposite arm, rising to her shoulder, finding the ends of her hair.
“Six months,” Zhuli said in a low voice, “and everything will grow back.” She gazed at him, and the dark smudges on her face, the bruising which had turned a sickly yellow, made her appear shadowed despite the sunlight in the room. “Sparrow, have you seen my violin?”
“Your violin,” he said stupidly.
She waited, watching him.
“Zhuli,” he said. He despised the quaver in his voice and pushed it down. “It was destroyed.” She nodded, as if waiting for the second half of the sentence. He looked at her helplessly. “It was destroyed.”
“It was,” she said. “But then…”
“Red Guards came yesterday, no, it was two days ago. They came and smashed all the instruments. They even came in here but Ba…we asked them to leave. Ba Lute was denounced, he had to go to a meeting but it’s finished now. He’s home. The Conservatory is closed. Maybe for good.”
Zhuli nodded. She seemed, to Sparrow, almost unbearably lucid.
“Where are Da Shan and Flying Bear?” she asked.
“In Zhejiang with Ba’s cousin. Mrs. Ma took them by train. You need to go as well—”
“Yes,” she said, and then so flippantly he didn’t quite believe she had spoken. “I should have studied agriculture after all. Cousin, haven’t you been listening to the radio? The campaign is everywhere. Zhejiang will be no different from here.”
He did not tell her that four professors at the Conservatory had killed themselves in the last week and that Professor Tan had been locked in a room without adequate food or light. Zhuli did not mention the denunciations Da Shan had written. A wave of chanting overran the streets but they acted as if they did not hear it. It moved along Beijing Road, circling them. Zhuli asked if he had seen Kai.
“I saw him two days ago. I couldn’t tell how he was.”
“But he’ll be protected, won’t he? Nobody will harm him. They won’t harm you.”
The feeling in her voice came from another time, an old longing that did not know how to fade. He didn’t know what to do but nod.
She closed her eyes. “I’m glad, cousin.”
When she spoke again, her voice was very calm. “I’m glad,” she said. She touched her hair again and then let it go. “It’s like morning when the stars are painted over by daylight, Sparrow. You think it’s very far away, all this light, and anyway there’s a great universe of stars and other things and so you never believe they’ll disappear…Sparrow, of all the things they say I am, they are right that I am proud. I was proud to be myself. I really did believe that one day I would play before the Chairman himself, that I would go to London and Moscow and Berlin!” She laughed, like a child at the antics of a little pet. “I know now. Those places will only ever be words to me. My pride was so great I imagined that I would stand in the room where Bach lived, I would see his handwriting, his rooms and his little bed, and I would show people what it meant to me. They would hear it. They would hear Bach in me, they would know that he was mine, too. I don’t know how, I don’t know why…”
The lucidity in Zhuli’s eyes frightened him.
“There’s a joke inside of it,” Zhuli said, “that’s why everyone laughs at me. Do you understand? All these things that we don’t have are nothing compared to the things we did have. A life can be long or short but inside it, if we’re lucky, is this one opening…I looked through this window and made my own idea of the universe and maybe it was wrong, I don’t know anymore, I never stopped loving my country but I wanted to be loyal to something else, too. I saw things…I don’t want the other kind of life.”
Sparrow stood and went to close the door that was already closed. He went to the window, which was latched tight, he drew the curtains and tried to think of what to do. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to Zhejiang. You won’t be alone. Flying Bear and Da Shan—”
“No,” she said. “It would only cause trouble for them.”
But what option was there? It was unbearable that there should be no escape. Think, he told himself, you must think clearly. The notebook, pen and cup beside the bed drew his attention, and he slid the pen aside and picked up the notebook. He was shaking. The sight of Wen the Dreamer’s handwriting disturbed him. Where was Big Mother, where was Swirl? They alone, not he or his father, knew how to protect her. He despised his own weakness. “Zhuli,” he said. “This disturbance will end. It must end.”
“My poor father. What will he feel when he comes home and sees what has happened to us all?”
He didn’t answer and Zhuli reached her hand to him, to the notebook. “I finished this one. Let’s continue. Chapter 17, it’s your favourite chapter, isn’t it? Here’s the box, under the bed. I had to hide it from Ba Lute.”
He lifted the box out. Zhuli combed her hands through her hair, as if preparing to receive a visitor. She said, “I have this idea that…maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived. That’s why it seems so familiar to us now. The future is arriving. We’ve come all this way to meet it.”
“Or maybe,” he said, “it’s we who keep returning to the same moment.”
“Next time, we’ll meet in another place, won’t we, Sparrow?”
“Yes, Zhuli.”
Sparrow read the chapter aloud as afternoon became evening, as if reading from the Book of Records was the same as shutting and bolting the outside door. Inside the room, Da-wei would soon leave America and return home, but before his departure, a composer named Chou brings him to a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. A hundred musicians radiate from the central figure of the conductor, Edgard Varèse, and, meanwhile, a second, smaller orchestra plays from an adjoining room. Alternating and colliding, audible but invisible to one another, they perform a single symphony using drums, alarms, scraps of song, sirens, a shouting flute, the bang and clank of metropolitan horns. The pandemonium of the symphony is the most beautiful thing Da-wei has ever heard. It seems simultaneously to include him and usher him on his way.