Knock him down!
“Before I die,” He Luting said, “I have two wishes. First, I want to finish my current composition, a seven-part orchestral work. Second, I intend to clear each and every charge against me.”
Unable to respond, the Red Guards took turns striking him.
“I am not guilty,” He Luting cried. He looked frail, much older than his age. Another blow from the Red Guards would surely cripple him. He Luting’s wife, children and grandchildren had been gathered on the stage behind him, their heads also pushed down, light reflecting off their hair. Words that He Luting had spoken to him, years ago now, returned to Sparrow. “Music that is immediately understood will not outlast its generation.”
“You opposed Chairman Mao!” Yu said.
“I am not guilty.”
“Disgusting traitor! You’re nothing but an animal we have to slaughter—”
“Your accusations are false! Shame on you for lying!”
Around Sparrow, in the hall, people stared, bewildered at He Luting’s temerity, his stubbornness.
On screen, the Red Guards, too, could not believe that this old man, this traitor and counter-revolutionary, this ridiculous musician, could possibly be challenging them. One yanked the microphone away.
He Luting reacted quickly, grabbing the microphone back. “Shame on you!” His voice broke, but he kept going. “Shame on you for lying! Shame on you for lying!”
In an instant, they had twisted his arms so viciously that he fell to the floor. The jeering of the crowd intensified. He Luting was in terrible pain. Kai’s face blurred into the screen and out. Amidst the shouted laughter, the Red Guards released him. Sparrow could see that they, too, wanted to laugh, to swell themselves up again, but He Luting was suddenly on his feet.
“Shame!” he shouted. The words ricocheted through the speakers. “Shame on you, shame on you!”
The room was shocked silent.
“Shame on you for lying!” His voice was hoarse and broken but still it cut through, by far the loudest sound emanating from the television. “Shame!”
The image disappeared.
Sparrow waited. The room seemed to tilt away from him, but he was held upright by the pressure of the bodies around him. The live broadcast did not resume. A newsreader appeared on the screen, but the transmission split into grey lines of static.
A buzzer sounded and and the workers returned, orderly and subdued, to their positions on the assembly line.
Punching in, Sparrow looked at the card reader and was surprised to realize that he had missed his birthday. Yesterday he had turned twenty-eight years old.
—
Eight months later, Chairman Mao decreed that cities were wasteful and the educated must be sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to experience rural poverty. All universities and middle schools still open would now be closed, all classes not yet cancelled were officially over. This new generation would be the heroic zhī qī, the sent-down youth. In early 1969, Sparrow was summoned by his work unit leader who informed him that, effective immediately, he was assigned to a factory 1,400 kilometres to the south, in Guangxi Province.
“Have you been been to the South before?” the cadre asked him.
“I have not.”
“You should thank the Party. They have given you this opportunity to faithfully serve the People.”
“I thank the Party and our Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao.”
This time he was not so naive as to ask if he would be allowed to compose once more.
Three days later, at the Shanghai Railway Station, hemmed in by a sea of young people, he heard a woman’s voice shouting his name. It was Ling.
The kindness of her expression and her obvious pleasure at seeing him surprised Sparrow, eliciting an unfamiliar pain; he had been alone for a long time.
“Tell me where you’ve been, Sparrow. Have you been in contact with anyone?”
His first instinct was to hide the truth. “Nowhere. No one.”
“Kai’s in Beijing now, did you know? He intervened and made sure we were both assigned to the South, and not to the coal mines at the Russian border.” Her voice dropped. “He’s done well, he performs regularly for Madame Mao.” When Sparrow didn’t answer, she continued. “Kai asked me to look for you. He said you might take a position with the Central Philharmonic…”
“But I don’t write music anymore.”
Ling studied him. She looked at him with a familiar intimacy, as if they were still the same people, as if nothing stood between their present and their past. “I was a month away from receiving my doctorate,” she whispered. “And then the announcement came, the university was shut down and it was over. Why aren’t you writing music? Listen, I still remember…” She hummed in his ear, so low that no one else could possibly overhear, a phrase from Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, and he wanted to put his hand to her lips, to quiet and protect her.
The day before, Sparrow had posted three hastily written letters: one to Big Mother Knife who was stuck in Yumen City and had not yet been granted a transfer back to Shanghai; one to Ba Lute, who was interned at a camp in Anhui Province; and one to Kai in Beijing. That night, enforcers from the Shanghai revolutionary committee had surprised the neighbourhood. They had pulled everyone from their rooms and ordered a renewed search for counter-revolutionary materials. Numbly, he had fed his books and music into the bonfires, even the three records, given to him by Wen the Dreamer twenty years ago. Sparrow had even burned the papers he had hidden up in the trusses of the roof. His beautiful Symphony No. 2, the still unfinished No. 3–they went into the flames. Nothing remained. He had watched, mesmerized, overcome by a sickening relief, as the albums and the papers, the music and the imagined music, twisted together into a kind of gelatinous mud.
All Sparrow carried in his rucksack was a light jacket, two changes of clothing, a washcloth, a sleeping mat, a cooking pot and, because he had promised Zhuli, the Book of Records.
“Have you had any news of the Professor?” he asked Ling.
She shook her head. “Even my aunt doesn’t know. He was detained and disappeared. And Kai cut all ties with him…You heard what happened to San Li?”
A train was hurtling into the station. “Yes,” he said. San Li had died, jumped from a window or was pushed. And then, more to himself than to her, “But since no one is responsible, there is no one to forgive.”
She spoke directly in his ear. “There is no point in forgiveness. We need to prosper.”
He could not imagine what she could possibly mean by the word prosper.
“Kai said we’re being sent to a place called Cold Water Ditch,” Ling said. “The closest town is Hezhou. I’d never heard of it before.”
“Cold Water Ditch,” he answered, wishing to make her smile. “The height of prosperity.”
“Comrade Sparrow, how would you define prosperity? I believe there is no prosperity but freedom.”
The doors of the train cranked open. People crushed forward. Ling gripped his arm so that, in the melee, they would not be separated.
The further they travelled from Shanghai, the more he felt as if he was breaking apart. At each station he whispered, as the older generation might have done, to the ghost of his cousin, “Don’t leave, Zhuli. We have no family in the city anymore. Stay with me.”
“She’s here, Sparrow,” Ling said. “Zhuli won’t leave us.”
So that when they arrived, after many days’ journey, in Cold Water Ditch, it was as if Zhuli, in some invisible way, had reattached herself to Sparrow’s life, to his consciousness and his being. A year later, he and Ling received permission to marry. And a year after that, they had their first and only child, a daughter, Ai-ming.