—
Sparrow left with Zhuli, his cousin clutching her violin case in both arms, walking with one foot narrowly in front of the other as if she regretted every inch of space she inhabited. Against the grey-blue wave of oncoming pedestrians, Sparrow wanted to clear a path for her and so he walked with his chest out and his slender arms swinging, deluding himself that he was a tank and not a paper boat. But nobody, not even schoolchildren, moved aside for him. Bicycles whizzed so close their handlebars clipped his elbows. How unlike Ba Lute he was. Given his father’s heft, Sparrow felt soft, flimsy and inessential.
The tram arrived. Zhuli turned and smiled distractedly back at him before the rippling blue of her dress disappeared among the other passengers. They did not meet up again until the gates of the Conservatory, where she called down to him from above. Zhuli was balanced gracefully on a concrete ledge, one hand hooked around the iron fence, the rest of her body tipped to the side. Her hair, gathered into a long braid, sat on her shoulder and the ends seemed alive in the breeze. Inside the gates, the pianist Yin Chai, the brightest star of the Conservatory and admittedly appealing in army-style shirt and trousers, was sitting on a bench. He had returned from Moscow after taking second place in the Tchaikovsky competition and everywhere he went, or so it seemed to Sparrow, a flood of stage lights followed him.
“What do you think, cousin?” Zhuli said, making a soft landing beside him.
The chatter of the students drummed at him like a headache. He smiled to hide his envy and fell back on a cliché, “?‘Can the sparrow and swallow know the will of the great swan?’ Yin Chai is a national treasure.”
“I prefer your compositions to his melodrama.”
“Do you?” Sparrow said, unable to believe it. Yet when his cousin played his work, it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.
He told Zhuli he would come find her in Room 103, her preferred practice room, and then dodged the crowd and climbed the imposing staircase. On the ground floor, all five hundred of the Conservatory’s pianos seemed to be singing and feuding together. He skirted Room 204 with its gongs and cymbals, 313 with its many-stringed zithers, and the violin-making workshops of 320. On the fourth floor, he glanced past an open door and saw the President of the Conservatory, He Luting, deep in conversation with a cadre Sparrow didn’t recognize. “That’s your decision,” He Luting was saying, “but exactly what constitutes a crime these days?” President He was famously blunt. Occasionally he invited Sparrow to his home to drink lemonade, listen to records and read over his compositions. The whole Conservatory knew that, when He Luting was a child, his elder brother had owned a French music text, and the book so enthralled Comrade He that, at night, he would sneak downstairs and copy it out by hand. Fascinated by the construction of Western music, he taught himself staff notation. When he finally became a Conservatory student in the 1920s, he was famous for falling out of bed with his hands still moving in the air. Sparrow longed to know what He Luting had been playing in his dreams. Had he been performing or composing? Had he been dreaming of his teacher, Huang Zi, who had himself studied under Paul Hindemith? Could dreams shed light on the architecture of the music in his head? Sparrow, too, dreamed all the time of things he had not written. Each morning when he woke, he heard these pieces like a vanishing noise in the street, and he wanted to weep over the music he had lost.
“No need to waste time. Just put your threats in Liberation Daily and see what else I say–” He Luting’s glasses had slipped far down his nose. In response, the stranger wore a complacent smile. Sparrow hurried on.
Further along the corridor, he arrived at the office he shared with Old Wu, a prodigy who played the erhu as if it were no more strenuous than clipping his toenails. He hadn’t seen Old Wu in weeks.
On Sparrow’s desk was a note written in the margins of a scrap of newspaper: “Teacher Sparrow, thank you for lending me your copy of Musical Life of the Germans. I read it in a single sitting and couldn’t sleep all night. Shall I come by your office today, around one? Respectfully yours, Jiang Kai.” Sparrow reread the letter. At one this afternoon, Yin Chai would be performing Tchaikovsky in the auditorium to oceanic waves of applause. Kai must have forgotten.
Sparrow slipped the note into his desk. The four ivory walls of the little room seemed to angle towards the window’s opening. He took out his Symphony No. 3, shoeprints and all, and laid the first movement across his desk. Try as he might, he could not smooth out the crumpled pages. He took up his pencil anyway.
Time itself, the hours, minutes and seconds, the things they counted and the way they counted them, had sped up in the New China. He wanted to express this change, to write a symphony that inhabited both the modern and the old: the not yet and the nearly gone. The ticking in the first measures was a quote from Prokofiev’s whirring machines in Symphony No. 7, and in the foreground was a dance, allegro risoluto, quickening until the bars were rickety with steps, twisting free at last like a gunshot to the sky. A free fall into the second movement, a scherzo, a trio of violins that did not sound like themselves, withdrawing as winds and brass began a slow march. A sound gone just as it was learning to be heard.
From the opposite wall, Chairman Mao gazed at him with a knowing smile. What have you ever written, Chairman Mao said chidingly, that is original? What can you possibly say that is worthy? Time passed and the paper grew warm in its patch of morning light. Three-quarters of Sparrow’s time was spent meeting quotas for the latest political campaign, and the other quarter teaching composition music theory. His own Symphony No. 1 had been performed, and well reviewed, only to be criticized by the Union of Composers. The symphony, they said, suffered from formalism and useless experimentation; the solemnity of the third movement did nothing to elevate the People; and the meaning, overall, was not immediately clear. If it hadn’t been for He Luting’s protection, the criticisms would have been far worse. Symphony No. 2, which he knew to be a work of great beauty, languished in his desk drawer, having never even been submitted for approval. Last month, he had set six poems of Wang Wei and Bertolt Brecht to music but these, Sparrow knew, were better left unheard. His students wanted revolutionary accessibility and his superiors tried to educate him on the correct political line, but what line could this be? As soon as he contained it in his hand, it opened its wings and filled the sky. What musical idea stayed fixed for a year or a lifetime, let alone a revolutionary age?
He squeaked open his desk drawer and looked again at Kai’s confident handwriting. Like He Luting, Kai had come from the remote countryside, he was playful and virtuosic, possessed an extraordinary memory, and loved music as mysteriously, as confusedly, as Sparrow himself. But Kai was prepared to succeed. To be a renowned musician, one surely had to be already successful in one’s own mind; only musicians with this nature could rise above the others. Life, Sparrow felt, would have no choice but to be generous to Kai.
He tried not to think of his own diminishing opportunities. He erased the last twenty measures he had written. For a long time, he sat, thinking, until the room itself became another room. On the empty page, a line came to him. The line moved forward along a steepening curve. He followed it, no longer conscious of the act of writing.