The cold forced its way in. Even though Swirl had emptied her suitcase and wore every piece of clothing she owned, there was no way to defeat it. Just now at the tap, she had watched, mesmerized, as her hands submerged in water and she had failed to register any sensation. It was as if the hands belonged to someone else. She had yanked them out, frightened, nonsensically, that the fingers would shatter. Nothing around her was what it seemed. The air, thick blue, appeared like paper.
She shared a single long bed with a district leader, a doctor, an economist, a public security officer, a schoolteacher, a tax lawyer and a translator of Russian literature. She, herself, was known as the wife. The first week, she had identified them by their sleeping habits: how they tossed, shouted and snored, how often they got up at night, how violently they squeezed back in, or if they slept as motionless as death. This morning, the district leader, convinced she had committed no crime, was speculating about her release date. “Perhaps today,” she said. “This month, certainly.”
“Comrade! Don’t you see this very idea makes you a perfect candidate for re-education?” The economist, who had been here the longest, was convinced no one would ever leave.
“I committed myself to the party when I was eleven years old! Without people like me, there would be no Revolution.”
“Hush. You’re the only one who still thinks of yourself as a revolutionary.”
The other women tittered but the district leader was unbothered. “I don’t expect a criminal like you to understand. The Party is my family and I would rather die than betray it.”
After roll call, they filed into the canteen. So many feet made a storm in the dust; it coloured the air, caked the floors and was the salt to everything that touched their lips. Swirl and the translator ate side by side. The translator chewed with her eyes tightly closed, making noises of gratitude as if, in her mind, she was relishing a succulent leg of duck.
Yesterday, Swirl had been handed a notice from the Bingpai revolutionary committee stating that Zhuli was now registered to live in Shanghai. The news had taken such a weight from Swirl that she, who never cried, had surprised everyone by weeping continuously. She had no news of Wen, only rumours that in the men’s camp not far away, no one survived. The corpses were left in the desert, unburied. Swirl would not allow herself to believe it.
Outside, beneath a sky that had turned from blue to paper white, they got in line to rinse their bowls. The colour of purity, Swirl thought. The ancients had imagined white as the colour of funerals, of fulfillment, loss and completion and now the white sky seemed ready to erase the earth. She hoisted up a basket and spade and joined her group. Try as she might, she couldn’t understand how she had walked to the cliff edge and found herself here. At the work site, several kilometres away, they were digging a channel. The soil, dry and easily eroded, fell apart under minimal pressure. She worked without thoughts; by midday, the sand glowed like a coin.
Night after night, stories were passed across the long bed. Months ticked by until at last she knew the intricate histories of all the women she slept beside, and they knew hers. A line of women who, one by one, had fallen through a rip in a dream and woken here. A lifetime ago, Swirl had gone to the ticketing office in Shanghai, ready to buy passage to Hong Kong, but she had been distracted by a novel, the Book of Records. It embarrassed her now, the way she burned candles so unthinkingly, gazing at words that seemed to hide ideas, or ideas inexpressible in words, how the sentences had carried her forward like a river or a piece of music. And yet how close the truth had seemed back then. She had been twenty-four years old and she had fallen in love.
Each day, the darkness fell fast. Black was the colour of the northern sky and therefore the heavens, the colour of the oceans, of everything profound and necessary, and so it must contain the life she was trying to reach. Her hands trembled all the time. On upholding her sentence, the head of the Bingpai revolutionary committee had assessed her coldly. He had concluded, “Deep in your heart you oppose the Communist Party.” Swirl had denied the accusation, but if hadn’t been true then, surely it was true now. Maybe her crime had been as simple as the inability to believe. In truth, since the age of fourteen, and until she met Wen, she had believed in almost nothing.
—
The life of a prisoner is one of endless motion. She was moved here and there, like a sack of goods. Dig ditches, mill flour, tend the pigs, grow vegetables, reform your thoughts, love the Party, collect firewood, denounce others, wash the grain, sing a song. The district leader, so sure she would be resurrected back to society, eventually committed suicide. The economist, adamant that the universe had forgotten them, was the first to be released. Day followed night, until Swirl suspected the Party itself no longer knew her whereabouts. No letters arrived and no word from Wen; she remembered sitting at the teahouse, waiting for instalments that would never come. The doctor told them of a camp not far away where a woman, who had been pregnant when she was sentenced, had given birth and the little boy had become the joy of the women’s dormitory; the story seemed impossible. How could a mother and infant survive in these conditions? Swirl dreamed of Big Mother and for days, consoled herself with childhood. In a dream, she sat beside her lost son, her parents, Wen, Zhuli. They talked about everything and then, when time ran out, they returned her to the dormitory, fitting her back like a book on a shelf.
Her one friend was the translator of Russian literature, and Swirl loved her. She would have given her the last fen in her pocket, the last piece of bread. The friend, quite famous, was the premier translator of the works of Dostoevsky.
On the long bed, the Translator had been the first to volunteer her story.
“It was during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. They told us to criticize the Party, the university, each other, even the quality of our lunches and the functioning of the toilets.” The Translator turned over and so did all the women, one after another, like waves against the shore. “So I, the idiot, stepped forward and said that my request for permission to travel to Leningrad had been denied fourteen times, and that a scholar of my standing must engage with her contemporaries. While I carried on, everyone else ran for higher ground.
“What I later wondered,” the Translator said, laying an index finger gently on her own nose, “was how I could have studied Dostoevsky so keenly and not realized I was digging my own grave?” The word, Dostoevsky, made up of eight different ideograms, made them all murmur in admiration. “My old mother thinks I’ve been assigned to a university in Harbin. She’ll fall to heaven’s gate if she learns the truth.” The Translator thumped the bed with her hand, as if to chase away a ghost.
“We must not lose hope! Chairman Mao is a good man. He knows our qualities and he will rescue us.” The Translator pressed one hand to her heart as if to keep it from breaking. An echo of agreement rolled from woman to woman. “How can it be otherwise?”
—
There came a period of time when there was no food. These were months of desperation. Even labour was halted. The camp director agreed that energy would be better spent seeking wild grasses or roots. Famine was devastating the province; to give a single grain of millet to convicts would surely be a counter-revolutionary crime. Swirl had the sensation of pages fluttering before her eyes. It was the Translator, fanning her. She had the sensation of being rolled down a hallway. It was the Translator massaging her arms and legs. She dreamed she was eating a succulent duck leg. It was the Translator, who had stolen a handful of beans from the kitchen of the camp director, cooked them illicitly and fed them to her. She listened as someone read aloud from the Book of Records. It wasn’t real. It was the Translator holding her hand. Confused, Swirl asked, “Who will come to rescue us?”