Blushing, Sparrow handed Zhuli her violin. “It’s nothing,” he said.
To banish the awkwardness in the room, she chose Ysaye’s sonata in the dubious E minor key. She envied the composer’s intellect, the observant compassion that Sparrow possessed, and wished to cultivate it within herself, but it was impossible. She was a performer, a transparent glass giving shape to water, nothing more than a glass. When the sonata ended, Kai leaped up and rushed from the room. “Some people really don’t like E minor,” Zhuli murmured.
“Perhaps he has an assignation.”
It was late, almost midnight. “I don’t think that our pianist has a lover.”
Sparrow looked faint.
To bring the colour back to his face, she reminded him that his mother and hers were packing their bags, they were leaving for the hinterlands of Gansu. “It’s better for Aunt Swirl. Shanghai is uneasy right now,” he said.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer. Zhuli wanted to ask him about fear because this unease inside of her, it too was a kind of desertification, a kind of hunger, and where would it end? It was cutting a fault line, running all the way to her hands.
But at that moment, Kai returned. “The Professor brought food for us,” Kai said, holding up three helpings of noodles, three wheat buns and, stunningly, a small jar of wine. Zhuli had no idea who the Professor was but decided it didn’t matter. Her stomach was rumbling. The melancholy in her cousin’s eyes vanished as if it had never been.
Kai said some students had returned from demonstrating, but the streets were calm. Calm for you, Zhuli thought. Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds, they were Sons of the Soil, Sons of Revolutionary Heroes, Sons of…she laughed and drank the wine. Her cousin’s face was hazy with joy.
She and Kai squeezed together on the bench. The alcohol made her thoughts light and immodest and she decided to climb up on the bench and salute her cousin. Kai wrapped an arm around her legs to prevent her from toppling over, and the pressure of his hands made Zhuli want to push him away and yet also collapse into his arms. “Cousin Sparrow!” she proclaimed. “Twice my age–”
“So old?” he protested.
“–but my best friend in all the world! I shall stand beside you when the flood comes!”
“May the flood bypass us all, sweet Zhuli,” Sparrow said.
“May the flood lift us to better shores,” Kai said.
Zhuli was the first to give in to exhaustion. She left them. Outside the practice room, she stood listening for a few moments, waiting for the music or voices to start up again, but there was nothing.
—
And yet, early the next morning, when the Conservatory was still quiet, here he was, just as he had promised: dear Kai, that exhausted performer, half draped over the piano as if over the arm of an old friend.
“You’re late, Comrade Zhuli,” he said.
“Did you sleep here?”
“With my eyes open and a pen in my hand.”
“Writing self-criticisms, I’m sure.”
He smiled. How tired he looked, and yet electrified, as if he had just emerged from a ten-hour seminar with Glenn Gould himself. “The truth is,” he said, “I’d never even heard Tzigane. I came early in order to practise it. I feared you would drop me from your concert and perform with Yin Chai instead.”
“So you’ve mastered it.”
There it was again: the proud shine in his eyes. “Of course.”
After playing it through once, they sat facing one another cross-legged on the floor. “Did you listen to the Oistrakh recording?” she asked him.
“A dozen times. I found it eerie and couldn’t stop…I also listened to Heifetz and Neveu.”
“Professor Tan told me to think about it alongside Gounod’s Faust,” Zhuli said. “You know, ‘All that you desire, I can give you.’ Selling your soul to the evil spirits. The usual thing.” Tan had said that the violin score of Tzigane was devilishly difficult. Perfect, she had thought.
Kai nodded and made illegible, floating marks on his score. “The piano part is mysterious, isn’t it?” He turned a few pages. “First, it enters late. Second, I find it cold. See how it never loses control and is never out of breath? And yet I feel there’s a great hunger here. It wants to control things. To push the violin closer to the edge, maybe.”
It was true. In the last third, the violin spun in faster and faster, nearly impossible, circles. She said aloud, without thinking, “Not love then, but something like it.”
She and Kai played the piece again and the incompatibility between the two instruments heightened, like a dance between two lovers who had long since ruined one another and yet moved forward in the same maddening steps. It doesn’t end well, thought Zhuli, reaching for the notes, her back pinched, her neck aching. She was the devil playing. The walls of Room 103 danced sideways and seemed to give way to her, as if she had become the rain and torrent.
The music ended. She sat down at the piano and stared at the keys. Kai took up her hands which were hot and damp. She hated it when people touched her hands, they were sensitive and in constant pain, and she’d had dreams in which they were crushed or cut open. As if he could read her thoughts, he let them go, picked up his pencil and tapped the score. “You see more in each measure than any violinist at the Conservatory.”
“The Conservatory is a tiny corner of the world.” She took the pencil from him, flipped to the meno vivo and said: “Here is where I stumbled. Fatally. Let’s go back once more.”
His hand floated down her back.
She moved to stand up, but his hand was around her waist.
“Zhuli.” His voice was too near to her, his mouth pressed against her hair. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.
She wasn’t afraid. Only, she thought, letting his mouth find hers, there are too many people, too many words, too many things that I wish for. I have the feeling there is too little time. They kissed. She didn’t know that she was still upright, she felt as if she had lain down on the floor of the room.
She pulled away and stood up and went to her violin as if nothing had happened, proud that she could be as uncaring as him, and tested the first bars of Tzigane. Her mind felt resolute and numb, but her heart was exhilarated. Kai was smiling at her. What did he feel, she wondered. Deep down, in that secret part of him, was there anyone he really trusted? She willed herself to disappear into Ravel. She let herself go, into the walls and into sound itself.
WITHOUT OUR REALIZING IT, the weeks following Ai-ming’s departure became months, and the months years.
On May 18, 1996, I was watching television and attempting to solve a hard problem (“Let D be a positive integer that is not a perfect square. Prove that the continued fraction of √D is periodic”) when the telephone rang. Ai-ming’s voice was miraculously clear, as if all that was required of me was to reach out my hand and pull her into the room. I was overjoyed. It had been a month since her last letter and Ma and I were expecting good news: after five long years, the rumoured amnesty had finally materialized and Ai-ming, along with nearly half a million others, had submitted her application for permanent residence in the United States.
“Ma-li,” she said, “I called to wish you happy birthday.”
I had just turned seventeen. Ai-ming rained questions on me–about Ma, math camp, my plans for university, our lives–but I ignored her. “What happened to your application? Did they schedule your interview?”
“No…nothing yet.”
I told her to give me her number, to hang up so that I could call her back.