When Sparrow asked how, he said, simply, “They shot him.”
Kai wiped his hand over his mouth. “Ozawa has promised to bring a few of us to America. I have this hope…”
The last time they had been alone, Shanghai was on the verge of change. This small room seemed to Sparrow like a hidden space inside the Conservatory. When he left this room, perhaps the door would lead him back to the hallway of the fourth floor, where the walls were covered with posters. He would arrive in his office before it was too late, he would tell his cousin that all things, even courage, pass from this world. Everything passes. But he could not get there in time. When he entered the room, he saw her again, just as she was. Each year, as he grew older, as the Zhuli in his memory grew younger, as Da Shan and Flying Bear drifted further away, he knew he should let them go. But how could he explain it? The person inside him, the composer who once existed, would not allow it. And Sparrow, himself, could not erase the composer. The composer wanted to tell Kai that no one, not even Deng Xiaoping, and nothing, no reform or change or disavowal, could return those years to them.
“Sometimes I think of leaving. If you had the chance to go overseas, Sparrow, would you?”
He smiled, wanting to make light of himself. “Even taking the train to Shanghai during Spring Festival feels like crossing the ocean. I never thought I would grow accustomed to the South but, after all this time, I feel at home here.” When he heard the words spoken aloud, they felt true.
Kai gestured towards the ceiling as if it were Inner Mongolia. “All the educated youth are going out of their minds, trying to get back to the city. And in Shanghai, they’re rioting, there are no jobs. Sparrow, look at it from their perspective. It would be unimaginable to them that someone could turn down a position at the Conservatory.”
“I prefer to wire a circuit board than to compose a symphony.” Inside the factory, Sparrow’s hands had learned another language entirely. His body had altered. Chairman Mao had not been wrong, to change one’s thinking, one had only to change one’s conditions.
Kai lit a cigarette and gave it to him. They were the luxury Phoenix brand, which Sparrow had never even seen before. Kai lit another for himself, holding it out to one side. The ashes fell harmlessly onto the concrete floor. The ceiling disappeared behind smoke.
“I used to hear music in everything,” Sparrow said, but the sentence hung between them. He did not know how to finish it.
“Dear Sparrow…” As Kai exhaled, he changed position so that the crook of his left arm partially covered his face. “I’m sorry for everything, I’m truly sorry….we were all alone but Zhuli’s situation was the most desperate. We all betrayed ourselves in some way. Not you…but I responded in the only way that I knew how. All I wanted was to protect those years of effort, to protect what I loved. I know I was wrong.” The words seemed to come from a far corner of the room, detached from Kai. “We all made mistakes….but can’t you see that it’s finished now. More than a decade has passed….She always said your talent was the one that mattered and she was right. What happened to your Symphony No. 3? It was your masterpiece. It was so full of contradictions, so immense and alive. I haven’t heard it in ten years, but I could still play it….You must have finished it by now.”
“I can’t even remember how it began,” he said. He wanted to ask Kai if he had denounced Zhuli, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. And it was true that everyone had denounced another to save themselves, even Ba Lute, even his brothers. Kai’s answer wouldn’t bring her back. “You loved her, too, didn’t you?”
“Zhuli is gone,” he said quietly. “Many people are gone, can’t you see?”
“I don’t see.”
Kai turned onto his side and looked at him, a beseeching look. He crushed out his cigarette and unthinkingly lit another, unable to bear the silence.
“At Premier Zhou Enlai’s funeral,” he said, “I went to Tiananmen Square, I read the posters and the letters people had left behind. I memorized them. Let me tell you, world / I do not believe / I don’t believe the sky is blue / I don’t believe that dreams are false / I don’t believe that death has no revenge. Everyone read them and I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change? Around Tiananmen Square, there were so many mourners…hundreds of thousands of workers. Crying openly because for a day or two, they could grieve in public. The police came and gathered up all the funeral wreaths. People were outraged. They gathered in the Square shouting, ‘Give us back our flowers! Give them back!’ They shouted, ‘Long live Premier Zhou Enlai!’ ”
Sparrow wanted to listen to Symphony No. 5 again, to the reflective and reflecting largo. Shostakovich was a composer who had finally written about scorn and degradation, who had used harmony against itself, and exposed all the scraping and dissonance inside. For years his public self had told the world that he was working on a symphony dedicated to Lenin, but no trace of that manuscript had yet been found. When he was denounced in 1936, and again in 1948, Shostakovich answered, “I will try again and again.” Did the composer inside Sparrow have the will to do this? But if he knew the will and the talent were gone, what good would it do to begin again?
“Sparrow, remember the classics we memorized? The words are still true. ‘We have no ties of kinship or even provenance, but I am bound to him by ties of sentiment and I share his sorrows and misfortunes.’ We’ve waited our whole lives and now the country is finally opening up. I’ve been thinking…there are ways to begin again. We could leave.”
The possibilities before Sparrow, which should have given him joy, instead broke his heart. He was no longer the same person.
I used to be humbled before music, he thought. I loved music so much it blinded me to the world. What right do I have, do any of us have, to go back? Repetition was an illusion. The idea of return, of beginning over again, of creating a new country, had always been a deception, a beautiful dream from which they had awoken. Perhaps they had loved one another, but now Sparrow had his parents to care for. They relied on him, and his life was not his own, it belonged to his wife and to Ai-ming as well. And it was true, factory work had brought a peace he had never known before. The routine had freed him.
Kai’s mouth was against his shoulder, the skin of his neck. They lay like this, unable to move forward, unable to continue.
Kai said, “What you said is true. I loved her. I loved you both.”
“There was no shame in that.”
“No,” he said quietly. “But I was ashamed.”
“We were young.”
“It was a kind of love, only I didn’t comprehend.”
“If you have the chance to go to America, you must go. Don’t let the opportunity pass. After all you’ve seen, all that’s been done, don’t turn back. Your family, and Zhuli, too, would have said the same.”
Kai nodded.
Was he weeping, Sparrow thought. The alcohol and the cigarettes had cleared his head and heightened his desire. There was no need to weep, he knew. They were fortunate, they had seen through the illusion. Even if the country went on, they could never be made to forget. I loved you both, Sparrow thought. I love you both.
“I’m sorry, Sparrow,” he said. “I would sacrifice anything to be a different person. Please. Please let me help you leave.”
“No,” Sparrow said. Zhuli is here, he thought. And the composer had long since gone away, only Sparrow himself had failed to recognize it. But he need only to look down at his tired, calloused hands to know. “My life is here.”
—
Ten years later, at the Shanghai Conservatory, Ai-ming was impeded by every kind of music: trills and percussion, a violin reciting a flotilla of notes. The Bird of Quiet walked ahead of her. In the new trousers, baby blue shirt, and leather shoes that Ling had given him for 1988 Spring Festival, her father looked taller. Or, maybe he only looked this way because, when he wore his usual clothes, the uniform of Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, Sparrow never stood up straight.