“Big Mother will be teaching a new model opera in Gansu Province,” Swirl said. “Since she’s leader of the Song and Dance Troupe, she arranged for me to accompany her. She already told the neighbours she’s going to handle my resurrection back into society. She told them that once I had lived in a Gansu mud hut for a few weeks, I would overcome the wrongs I committed and the idiocies of my youth.”
Her mother reached out, hesitantly, to touch the long ends of Zhuli’s hair. Her eyes were forthright and calm. “Foolish girl,” she said softly, teasingly. “I’ve already been to the sea and back. This is only a small journey.” Her mother’s grey shirt and pants were ironed and clean, proper and unassuming, but there was a look in her mother’s eyes that had nothing to do with propriety and obedience. There was no resignation, only a sharp knife in a pool of water. Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.
“Ma,” Zhuli said, “please let me go with you.” Even as she said it, she knew she didn’t want to leave. “Big Mother can arrange it, can’t she?”
Her mother said nothing as if the thought itself was not worth hearing.
Instead, Swirl picked up the copy she had made of Chapter 17 of the Da-wei novel and began to ramble like the evening newsreader. She would make further copies of all the chapters, she said, each one bound into a separate notebook, thirty-one notebooks in all. But in each one, the text would be marginally altered, and the date of copying added. They would use the same code as the original author, folding locations and information into the names of Da-wei and May Fourth, clues meant only for Zhuli’s father, changes he would recognize immediately as not belonging to the original Book of Records.
“But what location?” Zhuli asked. “It’s too dangerous for him to come here.”
Her mother had thought of everything. The location belonged to a third party, the Lady Dostoevsky, who had been resurrected by the Party and was now living in Gansu Province, working for a plant and flower clinic.
“She has given the clinic a wondrous name,” her mother said. “She calls it Notes from the Underground. The idea suddenly came to me. I remembered how Da-wei sent messages to his lover over the radio broadcasts, through the public airwaves. Hiding in plain sight. Big Mother and I will keep making copies as we go, and we’ll scatter them all over the Northwest. She’s already used the Conservatory’s machine to make a dozen copies of Chapter 17, your father’s favourite chapter. Wen might go without food for five days, but he can’t resist the literature section of the bookshops. We added the date, you see? As soon as your father sees it, he’ll know the message wasn’t left by the author. The message could only have come from us.”
Zhuli put her arms around her mother. Her mother hugged her back but her arms were light as wings.
“When do you leave, Ma?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning.”
She gripped her mother tighter. She remembered the little house they’d had in Bingpai, and the hidden, underground cavern, filled with books and musical instruments. She had climbed down into it as if into a magic kingdom and, in doing so, altered her parents’ lives forever. Did such caverns still exist, she wondered. If she found another, would she enter it again?
Her mother’s eyes flashed an unnerving light, part anger, part madness, part love. “Zhuli, be careful what you say and whom you trust. No one is immune. Everyone thinks that with one betrayal they can save themselves and everyone they love.” She looked down at the map again as if it, and not this room, this city, was the real world. “Think only of your studies. Don’t write to me, don’t be distracted. Promise me you won’t take any risks. Concentrate on your music.”
—
As Zhuli was on her way out again, Big Mother Knife was in the midst of winnowing through clothes, dried fruit, sewing needles, sleeping mats, various washcloths, a cooking pot and a collection of knives, trying to fit them into Ba Lute’s army rucksacks. “I’d rather have this cleaver than this pair of trousers,” Big Mother said thoughtfully, holding both items up for display.
“I’d rather you had the trousers,” Swirl said. “Come, tuck the cleaver into my quilt…”
Big Mother started singing a verse from “How the North Wind Blows,” interspersing bawdy words, and Swirl laughed and said, “Cover your ears, Zhuli!”
“Or add your own verse!” her aunt said, and the two sisters giggled and folded the clothing into smaller and smaller squares.
Da Shan had come home from school and was lying on the sofa with Chairman Mao’s guerrilla warfare essays on his stomach. “Take me with you,” he said. “I’ll be your pack horse.”
“If I gave you two grapes,” his mother said scornfully, “it would break your back.”
Da Shan sighed. “Why so hard, Mama?” he said and Big Mother turned, the trousers dangling from her fingertips. Her face softened and Da Shan sat up, took the trousers, folded them and rolled them up and handed them back to her. “You’ll need these, Mama,” he said, and smiled.
—
Zhuli clutched her violin and turned in the direction of the Conservatory. The spring sky was a haze of pink and grey. She walked slowly, listening to the scores in her bag rustling like kept creatures, wondering if Kai would come to see her in Room 103, or if instead she would find Yin Chai and Her Royal Biscuit huddled indecently together. Apparently Biscuit and Old Wu had broken up. But maybe, if she was lucky, the practice rooms would be completely still. Once or twice now, she’d had nightmares of standing up on stage before a thousand people, the eternally sleepless faces of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi gazing down on her from the walls, but when she set bow to strings, the first notes of Tzigane refused to sound. The audience grew restless. They laughed as she tried to restring her violin, jeered as she replaced her bow, deafened her with abuse, but no matter what she did, her violin would not play.
“Stage fright,” Sparrow had told her. “It’s normal to feel anxiety.” The Conservatory had set the date for Zhuli’s next solo concert, mid-October, a few days after her fifteenth birthday. She had wanted to play Bach or her beloved Prokofiev, but Teacher Tan would not hear of it. He wanted her to aim for the next Tchaikovsky Competition, four years away. “The Ravel is a better preparation, unless you prefer Paganini’s Caprice No. 24.”
“I’m the daughter of a convicted rightist, Teacher. I won’t be allowed to compete abroad.”
His eyes gave nothing away. “We must have faith in the Party. And you, too, must do your part.”
But two nights ago, Kai had told her that some, if not all, of these opportunities–competitions, scholarships–would be withdrawn. The Conservatory had been unusually quiet that night. It had been so hot, perhaps everyone had fled. “One day soon,” Kai joked, “we’ll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked.” His next solo concert had also been scheduled for October.
“If it weren’t for Ba Lute, they would never have accepted me into the Conservatory at all,” she said. “I fully expect to be transferred to an agricultural college in Shandong Province.”
“All the more reason to try to go abroad.”
She played a few measures of the Ravel. “Your father is a Party member, of course.”
“A pure seed of the earth. A peasant who played the bamboo flute and joined the Revolution so early, even our Great Helmsman didn’t know there was one.”
He liked to shock her. She refused to laugh. “I don’t believe anything you say, Kai.”
He took her hand and held it. “I’m glad, Zhuli. Never trust me.” He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to her cheek and then to her lips. The warmth of his mouth humiliated her, she turned her face but he kept holding on to her hand, the heat of his breath against her ear. Just at the moment when she wanted to give in, to kiss him fiercely, he had released her fingers. “Do what the old violinist says,” Kai told her. He continued as if nothing unusual had occurred. “Play the Ravel. I can do the accompaniment, if you wish.”