The Translator said, with a small smile, “No one. So be it.”
At the end of the famine, there were only three left on their long bed: the Translator, the tax lawyer and Swirl. They slept curled together for warmth. The rest–the doctor, public security officer, schoolteacher and district leader–had gone, as the saying went, into the pure white sky, into the western heavens.
—
In 1963, the tax lawyer was released and Swirl and the Translator were transferred to a camp called Farm 835. For the first time, they were allowed to receive mail. Swirl was greeted with two envelopes of letters–from Big Mother and family, and from Zhuli–packets so thick they took up half her sleeping mat. She savoured one each day, as if each was a bowl of rice. The translator, alone in the world, had received nothing.
One day, they were preparing the Translator’s coat for winter, sewing layers of cotton batting into the lining. The Translator was sitting with her eyes closed. She had a washcloth resting on her feet in place of shoes.
A voice called out to them.
Swirl glanced up to see one of the guards beside a stranger, a visitor from an alien world. The stranger, a city person, wore blue slacks and a blue coat filmed in dust. The longer she looked at him, the more he seemed like a sign on the road, blurred and far away, difficult to read. He was tall and slender, handsome, perhaps in his early twenties.
“Aunt Swirl–”
She stared. The guard looked at her curiously. He said something to the young man, then turned and walked away, leaving the young man by himself.
“You know me, don’t you, Aunt Swirl?”
Her voice didn’t work. She tried again, but the words came out strangely. “Little Sparrow.”
The Translator opened her eyes. “A handsome gentleman, to be sure. But Comrade Swirl, this bird is not so little.”
He was standing before them now. Setting aside the coat and batting, Swirl got to her feet. She had to hold the Translator’s shoulder for support.
“Sparrow,” she said. “How strange it is to see you. This…” She shook her head to clear it. “This is my friend, the Lady Dostoevsky.”
“A pleasure to know you, Comrade!”
“Isn’t it though! Well, come nearer and let us have a look at you…”
Swirl wanted to reassure him but all the words within reach seemed too thin, too airy.
The high dome of the air swallowed their voices. “How did you arrive? There’s no transport for miles.”
“By train and bus. After Lanzhou, a donkey cart picked me up. For the last two days, we saw no one.”
The boy, but he was no longer a boy, looked overwhelmed. It was her, Swirl realized suddenly. She must be quite unrecognizable, and her appearance had upset him. She felt ashamed even though she knew that it had nothing to do with shame, only time and circumstances, and her powerlessness to change them. She was touched that he made light of the considerable journey from Shanghai, five full days of travel at least.
Sparrow began unpacking cartons of cigarettes, biscuits, rice, dried fish, salt, preserved vegetables, and box after box of soft sorghum candy.
The abundance was so unnerving, the Translator let out a soft curse. She leaned sideways. “So this is the nephew, eh? The composer destined to become the Beethoven of the Huangpu River? Are you sure that’s what he does?”
Perhaps out of embarrassment or panic Sparrow tried to surround them with words. He said everyone was well, that Zhuli was thriving. He said he was writing music, that his Symphony No. 2 was inspired by their journey across China during the war years, the tea houses and blind musicians…He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?
His eyes had filled with tears, perhaps due to the dryness of the high plateau. She and the Translator gazed at him as if at an apparition. To their astonishment he withdrew a book from his bag, The Rain on Mount Ba, a classic novel.
“Zhuli asked me to give this to you, her favourite book.”
Swirl took it in her hands, confused. “But how can Zhuli be reading it already?”
“She’s eleven now,” Sparrow said, as if confused himself. With the rucksack emptied and hanging uselessly in his hand, he looked forlorn. He wanted to keep bringing things out, she thought, as if he could fill the desert with flowers.
The Translator lit cigarettes for each of them, and for a long time they simply sat in contemplative silence, smoking. Swirl tried to see the sky and the dormitories and the camp office though Sparrow’s eyes, but all she could do was glance at him, as if in a dream, and follow the smoke that curled out of his fingers.
“My mother is petitioning to have your conviction overturned,” he said. “She’s applied for permission to visit you and should be able to come within the month. Ba Lute says you mustn’t go back to Bingpai, you’ll live with us in Shanghai. Zhuli is such a gifted violinist, she never stops practising, the Conservatory will do anything to keep her.”
“But Sparrow…”
“My parents are still looking for Uncle Wen. I feel certain we’ll have news of him soon.”
“Sparrow,” Swirl said, taking his hand for the first time. She steadied her voice. “You must tell Big Mother that, when you found me, my only sadness was missing my family, my husband, my daughter. Nothing else. No suffering. You must thank them for me. You must tell Zhuli my life is good, the Party is re-educating me and I’ll succeed in correcting my mistakes. Make sure she thinks only of her future. She must not be troubled.”
“Of course, aunt.”
Sparrow suddenly remembered something in his pocket. He took out a photograph of Zhuli with her violin, and gave it to her. She had not seen her daughter’s face in more than four years. She stared at the image, as if into an unknown world.
“What is the famous poem?” the Translator said. “Destined to arrive in a swirl of dust / and to rise inexorably like mist on the river. Your daughter looks like you. My dear Swirl, the child has your face.”
Why do I weep, she thought, trembling. I should be overjoyed. Her daughter had seemed forever lost to her, and yet here she was, so near and close at hand. Perhaps her husband existed like her, still accused of being a traitor and an enemy, and yet their destinies had merged a long time ago.
That afternoon, at the camp office, Swirl waited in the doorway, sheltered from the scorching sun, with Sparrow. The oil truck arrived, her nephew climbed up into the back and, as if it had always been so easy, he left Farm 835. He held firmly to one of the oil drums, gazing back as the distance between them grew, and she knew there was something he wished to say but couldn’t. She tried to imagine his departure: the camp office diminishing in size, and then other buildings that would arrive and also vanish, until Sparrow came to the rail line, the endless trains and faces in the windows. Daylight drained into the ground. She knew that, one day soon, without warning, the conviction against her would be overturned. Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labour, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep? Would she feel joy? She should feel grateful for the chance to return to life. Yet even as Swirl imagined Shanghai, she feared that only the wide open desert and the sky seemed to know her, that it would sharpen and forever expand.