—
In Shanghai, Sparrow was taken away by Red Guards and for a week they had no word of him. A different group came for Zhuli on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then left her alone until Sunday. Sunday was the worst and the Red Guards came again on Monday. On Tuesday, Sparrow came home, starving and exhausted, but unharmed. He’d been held in isolation in a storage room and then let go. It was inexplicable. On the streets, loudspeakers blared from every corner. The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers. In the middle of the broadcast, Red Guards entered the house. Despite Sparrow’s begging, despite his grip on Zhuli, they took her. Her hand slipped out of his. In truth, the fear in Sparrow’s voice had so terrified her, Zhuli had closed her eyes and pulled her hand free.
At first, Zhuli’s classmates had been inventive. They had new slogans and methods, they had new implements like garbage pails, conductor’s batons and razors. There was a comedic quality to it all, one laugh crashing down onto the next, explosive laughter, barbed laughter, tripwire laughter, questions that were not questions, the confessions they wanted that had nothing to do with confession.
On and on they sang:
The water of socialism nourished me, I grew up beneath the Red Flag
I took the oath,
To dare to think, to speak up, to act,
To devote myself to revolution.
They loved to sing. It was the way they looked at her, the utter implacability, the contempt, she couldn’t bear. The revolutionaries soon lost interest in their own implements, and now they beat her with their bare hands. Kai said that she had always cared more about music and her desires than about the Party. He said he had tried to instruct her on the correct works, even going so far as to copy them out by hand for her, but she had rejected them. Her parents were enemies of the People and Zhuli refused to denounce them. She was loose and had no morals, she was degenerate. All passions should be subsumed to revolution, he said. He talked and talked and would not stop, but he never mentioned Sparrow’s name and never betrayed him. When he ran out of words, he left and did not come back. After this, she felt she understood everything. Music began with the act of composition but she herself was only an instrument, a glass to hold the water. If she answered the accusations or defended herself, she would no longer be able to hear the world that was finally seeping into her. Loud, strange music. She kept turning her head to try to place this second orchestra, this outer room, and meanwhile the revolutionary youth kept trying to make her face forward and look at the floor. She saw their hands shouting and their mouths smiling. Silently, she berated herself. Animals, she thought, do not weep. Instead they never look away.
That day, Sparrow brought her home. He couldn’t stop weeping and she realized she’d never seen him fall apart and it frightened her. But he was safe, she thought. The Red Guards had not harmed him. She thought that Kai was protecting him. Always, the pianist was just behind Sparrow, watchful, but perhaps it was all in her mind. Still, some link between the three of them could never be broken, it was the future that was to have been, if only the country had chosen a different path. She wanted to ask Kai so many questions. She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn’t the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions. She wanted to tell him, “Don’t let them hurt your hands. Your gifted hands.” She wanted to tell Sparrow, “No matter what happens, you must finish your symphony. Please don’t let it disappear.” Did it matter more to love or to have been loved? If anyone answered her question, she didn’t catch the words. I am so far away now, Zhuli thought, that words dissolve before they reach me.
How far is that, she thought. She felt terribly alone. How much farther?
—
With Da Shan and Flying Bear away in Zhejiang, the laneway house was quiet. On Thursday, she woke very early as she used to do. The inky darkness of the night protected her as she put on her favourite blue dress, pinned the rough edges of her hair aside, gathered what she needed and slipped through the front door. The gods of silence protected her and neither Sparrow nor her uncle woke; or if they did wake, they chose not to stop her from leaving. The night was a dream, a pure warmth that settled on her and seemed to ease her awake. She could barely walk and yet nothing hurt. She took side streets and alleyways to the Conservatory and the journey lasted a long time. Small fires burned. She came to an intersection that was piled high with books. They looked as if they had been overturned from a truck, they made a shape like a sand dune. Here and there were groups of students sleeping outside. One woke and watched her passing but seemed to think Zhuli was part of her dream; the Red Guard gazed at her and did nothing. There were posters everywhere, a mute shouting that surrounded Zhuli but no longer frightened her. She did not know how or why, but now that she understood, now that she had come to a decision, the old fears had drained away. Asleep, the revolutionaries appeared innocent, they seemed as nothing. Zhuli walked and saw buildings, littered streets, damaged lights, scraps of clothing, broken furniture. She felt the hardness of the pavement, the blue-black air and even the weightlessness of her dress. No matter which way she turned, the roads twisted and led her to the Conservatory, this had always been the course of her life. Past the gate, the courtyard was alive with shapes, small and large piles of trash which she moved between as if they were a row of empty seats. The Conservatory door had been propped open with a shoe, she did not know why, but she left the shoe in place, nudged the door wider and went inside. She thought she saw abandoned programs, lost handbags, forgotten coats and then, after a moment, the hallucination passed and she came to the staircase she had first climbed when she was a child, when Sparrow, holding her hand, had brought her to study with Professor Tan.
The Conservatory smelled of both damp and fire, a smell that seemed, as she moved through the building, to be coming from the workshop where Professor Tan had built violins using thin boards of parasol-tree wood. Zhuli stopped and looked in the door, thinking perhaps there was a violin that she could take with her and play, a violin that she could make her own. But there was nothing. Bits of wood looked as if they had been flung in joyous celebration at the windows. She went on. At the fourth floor, she turned down the hallway and saw the same posters that Kai had shown her many weeks ago. Zhuli began to pull them down. Witch. It was slow and noisy work. The papers made a terrible noise but it no longer mattered. There were so many, the posters seemed to proliferate as she removed them. She took out the red marker she had slipped into her pocket and stood before the last poster, ready to strike, but the hallway was so rigidly devoid of life she could not think of any words. Once Debussy had trickled through the walls. She heard it now, again, and was grateful, it was as if all the gods were gathering, they had come to meet her here. What had become of He Luting and and all the rest? The parents of Fou Ts’ong had taken poison and killed themselves. It was being celebrated. The rest must have gone away somewhere. Had the older generation seen everything coming and quietly dissolved before the hammer fell? She hoped so. She lifted the marker again and wrote the only words that came to her. She did not put down the writer’s name, Shen Congwen, or the novel, Border Town. The marker moved as if of its own accord. This is what is in my mind, she thought, another person’s words.