9
LONG AGO, AI-MING LAY beside me on my bed, holding Chapter 17 from the Book of Records in her hands. The story continued even though she had long stopped reading from its pages. In the quiet, Zhuli existed between us, older than me, younger than Ai-ming, as real as we were ourselves. Each time we set the notebook down, I had the sensation that she remained. It was we, Ai-ming and I, listening, who vanished.
LONG AGO, WHEN they lived in Beijing, Big Mother Knife had taken Sparrow to Tiananmen Square. Sparrow had only been a child but he remembered, still, how the concrete felt inextricable from the grey sky, how he himself was impossibly small, like a seed in a bowl. The Forbidden Palace and Tiananmen, Big Mother told him, were built on a north-south axis that mirrored the human body. “Head!” she shouted, pointing to something he couldn’t see. “Lungs! Feet!” Tiananmen Gate, festooned with imaginary animals, was the protective tissue around the heart. North-gazing animals monitored the behaviour of citizens, while south-gazing animals judged how power treated the powerless. Sparrow had imagined himself as a stone creature on the gate, wings outstretched, beak glistening in the rain.
Day after day, Sparrow read the public newspapers pinned up at the post office. Photos in the People’s Daily captured the exhilaration inside Tiananmen Square, as hundreds of thousands of Red Guards lifted their Little Red Books to Chairman Mao, whose tiny figure waved back from atop the gate. The students arrived by trains for which they no longer needed tickets. They rushed into the Square like water pouring into a single container. “Ten thousand years, ten thousand years!” they shouted under the gaze of those imaginary animals. “A hundred million years to Chairman Mao!”
September blared on, wet and sticky. There was a smell in the air, a nauseatingly sweet smell of bodies left to rot in cellars or on the street. When the Shanghai students returned from Beijing, they were even more single-minded than before.
For a week, Ba Lute had been locked up in a shed with six other faculty from the traditional music department. After his release, he was barely able to stand. A letter from Swirl, sent via Big Mother Knife, arrived: Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, referred to as two bags of ribbon, had been safely received in Mongolia. They begged for news. Ba Lute’s reply was only three sentences: Everyone is fine. No need to hurry back. Long live Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!
Every moment, Sparrow expected to be summoned but the Red Guards never came for him; everyone seemed to have forgotten he existed. He kept seeing the Conservatory, the record, the rope. During the day he tried to sleep and at night he kept watch over the bed in which Big Mother, Swirl, Zhuli, and his brothers had, at different times, slept. In the gloom, he searched for the outlines of his own hands and feet but they were camouflaged by the darkness. Night after night, he felt as if he was slowly approaching Zhuli but when morning came he saw that he had only slipped further away, and the distance between them was growing. His unfinished symphony played on in his head, unstoppable. All it lacked was the fourth and final movement, but what if the fourth movement was silence itself? Perhaps the symphony was complete after all. Too numb to weep, unable to put words to what he most feared, he bundled the pages up, intending to burn them, but in the end he hid them under the trusses of the roof.
—
Two months after Zhuli’s death, Sparrow accompanied Kai to the house of a high-ranking official who lived on Changle Road. On the streets, there was turmoil, warfare between gangs of Red Guards over territory and influence. The official’s home, however, seemed a separate country, hushed by walls of scrolls and paintings. The light that fell through the stained-glass windows was the impossible blue of sapphires.
“We recently recovered this piano,” the official said, as he ushered them into a high-ceilinged room. Recovered from where, or from whom, he did not say. “As the instrument is far too valuable to remain here, the Party is shipping it to Beijing.”
A young girl in a flowered dress brought out an overabundance of food and drink. Sparrow gazed at the clean edges of his dinner plate while the official spoke at length about Madame Mao, the new model orchestras and a reconstructed Central Philharmonic in Beijing. “Comrade Sparrow,” the official said, dabbing his lips with a pure white napkin. “Your compositions found favour with the President of the Conservatory, didn’t they? The former President, that is.” He smiled in a friendly way. “He Luting was a bit stuck in his ways, don’t you think? Fortunately things have changed. Now is the time for new music, a revolutionary realism befitting our Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
Kai said, “Comrade Sparrow’s work is a model of what this new music might be.”
The official nodded. To Sparrow he said, “You’re fortunate to have such an admirer, aren’t you?”
Above them, the ceiling fan spun, making a sound that was both monotonous and numbing.
An array of Front Gate, Hatamen, and State Express 555 cigarettes, as well foreign brands Sparrow had never seen, were arranged on a celadon platter. He sampled the Davidoff and the Marlboro, and the cigarettes left an unanticipated taste, of sweetness or sharpness, on his lips.
The official motioned Kai to the piano. Kai sat down, thought for a moment and then played, from memory, a piano transcription of Beethoven’s “Eroica.” The segments he played had been re-ordered and soldered together in ways that made Sparrow feel as if the music were being composed in this very moment or, more accurately, being dismantled. The word eroica, Sparrow said, turning to the official, means “heroic.” The man raised his glass. “To Comrade Beethoven, our revolutionary brother!”