They used foreign words to describe the sound, which made her feel as if the night sky had been slipped into her pocket.
“Since the reform and opening up, I’ve tried to — it’s very difficult — I can’t stop thinking about her, about Zhuli. Do you find that strange?”
“No, Sparrow. But…no one is responsible for what happened.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Come back and teach at the Conservatory. You’ll be able to write again, to continue where you left off. What happened to your symphonies?”
Her father laughed and the sound chilled her. “My symphonies…”
Ai-ming must have slept because when she opened her eyes again, Kai was gone. It was only Sparrow sitting in front of the square box, leaning towards it as if to another, more beloved, child. When Big Mother lit the lamp and found her curled up on the floor, she gave Ai-ming the needle eye.
“I was listening to music,” Ai-ming said. “And I had a stomach ache.” She smiled because her own words sounded preposterous.
“Who gave you permission to have a stomach-anything!”
The Bird of Quiet paid no attention.
Early the next morning, she found him sitting outside, smoking peacefully, oblivious to the breakfast Big Mother had prepared. One by one, Ai-ming ate all his spicy cucumbers.
The Bird of Quiet was a shy creature. One had to approach him softly, as if he were a goat. “Who built that singing box?” she whispered.
He started. She feared that everything she did unsettled him, and it made her so mad she wanted to shout at him and slap herself.
Sparrow said it wasn’t a singing box, it was an “electric singing engine,” a record player.
“I want to see it.”
He brought out the box once more. When he lifted and let go of its sturdy whisker she could not tell if her father was bothered or tired, or only lost. The piece of music with the slow, spare notes turned out to be Variation No. 25 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. She told her father that hearing the music was like looking into a radio. What she meant was that, even looking at the innards of the sets her father brought home, even staring into the belly of the machine, into the thing itself, electricity and sound remained as exquisitely mysterious as the night sky.
He looked at her with such sadness, as if she were someone else entirely. He taught her the first foreign names she ever learned: the first, Bā Hè (Bach) and the second, Gù Ěr Dé (Glenn Gould).
—
Inside Sparrow, sounds accumulated. Bells, birds and the uneven cracking of the trees, loud and quiet insects, songs that spilled from people even if they never intended to make a noise. He suspected he was doing the same. Was he, unconsciously, humming a folk song or a Bach partita, had he done it when he walked with Ai-ming at night, hoping to turn her eyes to something larger? The hiss of small, soldering devices crackled in his ears, the same tired jokes, the same clanking and capacitors, resistors and minuscule shunts, the high-pitched pain in his hands, the sly meetings and self-criticism sessions, the repeated slogans like a knife sharpened to dullness: sound was alive and disturbing and outside of any individual’s control. Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite. One night he dreamed that he sat in a concert hall. Around him programs fluttered, voices hummed, bags opened and closed, the orchestra keened towards harmony. Giddy with joy, full of nervous anticipation, he awaited the performance of his own Symphony No. 3. A chime summoned the last members of the audience. The lights dimmed. Quiet settled. He watched, unable to move, as Zhuli walked onto the stage in a long blue dress. She searched the auditorium for him. Her hands were empty. He woke.
—
In the Cultural Palace of the People, on the grounds of the Huizhou Battery Factory, Sparrow presented his ticket, expecting to be turned away. Instead he was shown to a row of reserved seats. Everywhere was movement. Upwards of a thousand people pressed into the hall, Party cadres (grey), office workers (white), assembly line workers (blue), filing beneath a cascading banner that read: Fully expose and condemn the treason committed by the Gang of Four!
Sparrow found his seat. Beside him, a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in a pale green skirt and a flowered blouse, was turning heads. A few months ago, the flowered blouse would have been deemed unacceptable, even criminal; but today it was merely odd. The young woman, confusingly familiar, wore her hair loose. Unbraided, it curled in arabesques. There was a mark on the underside of her chin, the shape of a thumb, a violinist’s mark. She turned and met his gaze. Sparrow blinked, embarrassed to be caught staring. He turned back to the stage. Eventually the conductor of the Central Philharmonic, Li Delun, stepped forward. From the podium, Li stared out with a quivery calm. The two pens in his breast pocket shone extravagantly. Li introduced the concert program (Mahler, Beethoven and Copland) and then began speaking, at length, about the successor to Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping. It was extraordinary that Deng had come to power. He, too, had been brought down by the Cultural Revolution, his political career destroyed and his family targeted. His eldest son had been tortured by Red Guards and, in 1966, fell, or was pushed, out of a third-storey window, the same as San Li. But father and son had outlasted the turmoil, the son now famous in his wheelchair. Deng had out-manoeuvred Madame Mao and her admirers, who now languished in prison. Now, with the backing of the Politburo, he was unrolling a series of economic and political reforms. In the auditorium, Li’s speech was a kind of song in itself, in which people intermittently cried out, “Ashes burn once more!” and “Strive to implement the Four Modernizations of Comrade Deng!” The Great Helmsman’s name, xiǎo píng, meant “little bottle” and so, in the trees just outside, someone had hung a collection of small green bottles, along with colourful banners that read, “Deng Blue Skies.” The glass tinkled in the breeze, a hope for better days.
Facing waves of applause, Li cried out, “Let us build a just society, a revolutionary China fit for a musical people!”
Beside Sparrow, the young woman sighed as if wishing to propel herself onto the stage where the musicians were now filing out in solemn rows.
The Central Philharmonic wore their everyday clothing, grey or blue slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirts. Sparrow’s heart was beating so oddly, he felt it was detaching from his body. The sound of the orchestra tuning chilled him; strings, woodwinds and brass made their simultaneous climb or descent to a sustained A, and an oboe fluttered up the scale like a thought set loose. Sparrow had not seen a score since 1968, and the ones used by the Philharmonic appeared to be hand-copied. The music stands, too, were makeshift, held together by tape, string and wooden splints. He felt the clattering tap of Li Delun’s baton on the music stand as if the conductor had rapped on Sparrow’s own spine.
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony rose in a tentative hum.
The house lights had remained up and every face in the audience, every small reaction, was visible. No one fidgeted. On stage, the musicians leaned forward, as if they were sliding across the same tilting boat. A bright red banner gave way at one corner, “Premier Zhou Enlai lives forever in our hearts.” It folded diagonally but didn’t fall.
Danger seemed to come from every side. The young woman’s hands were covering her face and he wanted desperately to take them and place them in her lap. You must not let them see, he thought. If they see that you are devoted to it, they will take it from you.
The reverie of the first movement sharpened to a hallucinatory edge. Sparrow silenced the music by thinking about Mahler himself. Late in life, the composer had discovered, in German translation, the poets Li Bai and Wang Wei, and their poetry had provided the text for Mahler’s song symphony, “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth). The poems had been translated into French, and then into German, and from there Mahler had made his own additions so that the poems, copies of mistranslated copies, were almost untraceable to their beginnings. But some were known, including Wang Wei’s “Farewell,” familiar to everyone of his and his mother’s generation, even if they no longer recited the lines. “At odds with the world, return to rest by the south hill…”