“His question devastated me. How could I pretend that music was salvation? How could I commit myself to something so powerless? I had been a miner for six years, there was coal dust in my lungs, I’d broken all the fingers of my right hand, how could I possibly hold a violin? I told him, ‘I don’t know.’ But he kept pushing me for an answer. It wasn’t enough for him to hear that I loved music, that it had comforted me all this time, and I had promised myself that if I survived, I would devote my life to it. There were thousands of applicants for a handful of spots at the Conservatory. They all loved music as much as I did. Finally I told him the truth. I said, ‘Because music is nothing. It is nothing and yet it belongs to me. Despite everything that’s happened, it’s myself that I believe in.’
“Tan Hong shook my hand. He said, ‘Young Liu, welcome back to the Conservatory. Welcome home.’ ”
Tofu Liu showed me his mementos. These included a photo of Zhuli performing with the Conservatory’s string quartet when she was nine years old and a wire recording of Zhuli and Kai playing Smetana’s “From My Homeland,” which Liu had kept hidden until the end of the Cultural Revolution.
“But, Mr. Liu, how could you possibly hide these things?”
He shrugged, smiling. “Before I was sent to the Russian border, I cut a small hole in the parquet floor of my bedroom in Shanghai. You know how hard parquet is! All I had was a kitchen knife. It took me two terrible weeks. I was convinced that Red Guards would burst into the room and that would be the end of me. I buried a dozen wire recordings, some photos and scores, and my violin. Ten years later, when I pulled it up, there was a nest of mice inside the violin…But look at this wire.” He lifted the spool and showed it to me. It was pristine. “Would you like to hear it?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
Delicately, he loaded the spool into an antique wire recorder. When it was ready, he turned a knob.
The notes came to me. I half turned away.
I thought I saw curtains shift and Ba looking down at me from a window above. On the ninth floor, he leaned out. Did anyone else see him? Was it only me? My father had blindfolded himself, he had tied a piece of cloth over his face before he took his life. I had learned this only after obtaining copies of the Hong Kong police files, and the detail had broken me.
This was the first time I had ever heard Ba playing the piano. Jiang Kai seemed a stranger to me, someone who had always been more alive, more full of memory, than I could know. And yet, hearing Zhuli’s violin, her measured, open voice, why did I feel as if I had known her all my life?
We listened to the recording three, four, five times. Each time I heard something different, a separation and a unity, the musicians, dust, the machine, our breathing. Music. Each time, at the end, I heard my father’s voice, speaking. I had not heard it since I was ten years old. His voice like no other voice that had ever lived.
I wept. Seeing that I was upset, Mr. Liu brought me a cup of tea. “It’s difficult to understand,” he said. “The pressure on us was unimaginable. Don’t forget, back then, your father was only seventeen years old….we were all too young.”
We returned to the table. I showed him my copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records.
“Teacher Liu,” I said, “I’ve made tens of thousands of copies of all the notebooks. With a few keystrokes, it’s possible to send files anywhere in the world, instantaneously. I want it to exist everywhere, to keep growing and changing.” From my bag, I took out Sparrow’s composition, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. “This is the piece of music I mentioned to you. It seems only right to perform it here in Shanghai. To record it. But…I really wonder at my sanity.”
Liu took the pages. Slowly he read through them.
I watched the curtains move and the wind alter; Ba and Ma had left this world, yet I was here in Shanghai. I still breathed and changed and dreamed.
After a long time, Liu looked up from the score. “Ma-li,” he said, “I’m sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life’s work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked yourself? Surely it’s what we each carry, in greater and greater quantity as we age, remembrance.” He used the word jì yì, which has two meanings: 记忆 (to recall, record) and 技艺 (art). He was silent for a moment, looking down at the pages. “The music reminds me of something Zhuli said when we were rehearsing Prokofiev. She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear? Is it better to have been loved, or to love? Of all his compositions, this is Teacher Sparrow’s most extraordinary.”
He opened his violin case and lifted the instrument out. A phrase filled the room, it seemed to move both backwards and forwards, as if Sparrow wished to rewrite time itself. Note by note, I felt as if I was being reconfigured.
When Teacher Liu set the violin down, he asked me, “Do you play the piano?”
“I never learned.”
“Then I’ll arrange everything. Teacher Sparrow meant for this music to be heard here.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
Before I left, I showed him a photograph of Ai-ming.
“Why, it’s Zhuli isn’t it?” he said in surprise, staring at the image. “It must be. No? It’s Teacher Sparrow’s daughter? Ai-ming. Ah, well. How remarkable. She has the very same face as Miss Zhuli.”
Tofu Liu gave me the recording to keep and I gave him a copy of Sparrow’s music. I remembered, then, something that Ai-ming had said. I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. “But that’s how the world is, isn’t it?”
6
SPARROW WAS PEDALLING SLOWLY home from Huizhou Wooden Crate Factory, pushed forward by a steady breeze. It was late August, just after rainfall. Along the road, loudspeakers announced a special program: “Tonight in Beijing, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy, will perform for Madame Mao. This is their third concert in the city, one of a total of six performances in China.”
The newsreader had said the date, September 14, 1973.
But it was 1976. The concert had been almost three years before. Others, too, were staring up at the loudspeakers, just as baffled. It had been nearly a decade since the radio had broadcast any music besides the eighteen approved revolutionary operas. Now, music exploded above them, the feverish opening crescendo of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Sparrow coasted to a stop, bewildered by its detail, the cheerful, almost absurd piano and the tinkling brass.
By the time he reached home, the second half of the program had begun. His daughter ran out to meet him. “It’s a new work by Madame Mao!”
Sparrow smiled, despite himself. “No, Ai-ming. This is Beethoven and it comes from another century.” This is a fragment, he thought, of something that once existed but that no longer grows here, like a field cut down.
He went inside. The Sixth Symphony, Beethoven’s Pastoral, trotted gaily through the rooms. Even Big Mother was lost in thought. He thought the walls were creeping nearer to him, they brushed his arms and scraped the back of his neck. You could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its contents when you stopped reading, but music wasn’t the same, not for him, it was most alive when it was heard. Year after year, he had wanted to play and replay it, to take it apart into its component pieces and build it once more. And then, finally, after six years, after seven, and then a decade, his memory had gone quiet. Without trying, he had stopped remembering. But this broadcast, what was it? Were they hearing the future or was it only the final outburst of the past? Long ago, He Luting had shouted, “Shame, shame. You should be ashamed,” and Zhuli said, “I will make Prokofiev himself proud.” If the concert truly took place in Beijing, Kai must have attended. A sound inside a sound. But what if all of this was only in his mind?