How difficult would it be to track down Comrade Glass Eye? Surely in the Village of Cats, outside of Wuhan, he would be easy to find.
Two days later, he told Ba Lute that he had accepted the Conservatory’s commission to collect folk songs in Hebei Province. His composition student, Jiang Kai, would accompany him during the six-day trip, and serve as research assistant. Sparrow even showed his father the steel wire recorder and wire reels he had borrowed from the Conservatory. Ba Lute nearly levitated with pride. He unpacked crumbling maps and expired train schedules; he weighed Sparrow down with letters for long-lost comrades from Headquarters until Flying Bear giggled and said, “He doesn’t work for China Post, Ba!”
Da Shan said morosely, “Who knows if your friends are still alive?”
Ba Lute gaped at him. Sparrow gathered up the letters and said, “Don’t worry, Ba, I’ll deliver them all.”
Zhuli tapped her fingers on the cracker in her hand, swept her long hair over her shoulders and said, “Careful with the ruffian.”
He smiled and resumed packing and she slowly ate her cracker. She whispered to him, “I’m not going anywhere until my mother gets back. She and Big Mother must be halfway to the desert by now. You’d like me to go with you and Jiang Kai…wouldn’t you?”
He kept packing.
Zhuli continued. “I would love to but…what if there’s a visitor or a message from my father?” And she stared at him with her searching eyes.
“Yes,” Sparrow said. “Good idea.”
Then he told her: “Think only of your concert, Zhuli. Practise every moment, don’t let this opportunity slip away. Think what it will mean to your parents if the Party allows you to study overseas.”
She blinked away sudden tears. “I won’t let them down, cousin.”
—
He met Kai at the bus station early the next morning. Beside the squat buildings, the ration lineups shifted in blurred congestion, winding around corners and disappearing into the horizon. The streets felt tense and watchful. When their bus flapped open its doors, they managed to find two seats near the back, over the tire. Kai insisted on carrying the wire recorder. Meanwhile Sparrow held his erhu against his chest and tried not to be crushed. More and more people shouldered on and the bus seemed to expand and contract like a lung, and then only contract. A supremely old lady folded herself onto Sparrow’s seat, and he found himself squeezed against Kai’s shoulder. As the bus bounced onto Jintang Road, Sparrow saw the city change, the concrete blocks giving way to open spaces, patches of light gliding into the flatlands of the outskirts. Kai’s unruly hair shuddered in the breeze. Sparrow began to sweat. The bus laboured on.
At some point, he must have fallen asleep. He woke up to find Kai’s arm around him, protecting him and the erhu from the old lady who had the concentrated heft of a bowling ball. Inch by inch, she was appropriating the seat, and at the same time cracking sunflower seeds in her teeth. Sparrow tried to return to the dream he’d just awoken from, which involved Herr Bach seated before a comically small pianoforte, playing No. 13 of the Goldberg Variations in order to demonstrate a particular subtlety of strict counterpoint. The composer’s name brought together the words bā (longing) and hè (awe). Bach’s face was as solemn as the moon. In the sticky, sweaty rocking of the bus, music rippled in his memory as he walked on stepping stones marked bā, hè, bā, hè, Sparrow fell asleep again.
Kai woke him in Suzhou. They alighted, as if drunk, from the bus. Inside Sparrow’s rucksack, the thirty-one notebooks of the Book of Records (all mimeographed except for the hand-copied Chapter 17) elbowed against his back, as if he were carrying Da-wei and May Fourth on his shoulders. They sprinted to catch the bus to Nanjing, which had just begun to pull away. The bus groaned forward and the ticket taker waved them up to the roof to find a space among the chickens, the students and the baggage.
Kai climbed up first, then turned, reached down and grabbed Sparrow’s arm just as the bus was picking up speed. When Sparrow looked dizzily up, all he saw was the pianist’s earnest face against the white sky, and then, panicking and holding on for dear life, he was hoisted up beside Kai. The students on the roof made space for the bewitching Kai, who naturally took centre stage. The pianist could speak with both the quickstep of the city and the balladry of the countryside, he was a one-man Book of Songs and Book of History. Kai told a sly joke that made the boys howl and the girls smile knowingly. The grip of Kai’s hand on his had left a bruise on Sparrow’s skin and it ached to the teetering of the bus. “Teacher,” the pianist said, touching his arm briefly, “won’t you play a song to light our way?” A teasing affection gleamed in Kai’s eyes and made the girls draw closer. “This comrade,” he told them, “is our nation’s most celebrated young composer! Believe me, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your lives.”
Sparrow ignored him, tuned his erhu and swept them into “Fine Horses Galloping,” which got the boys whooping and the girls singing. A red-cheeked beauty with sparkling eyes somehow ended up at his knee. When he finished she asked him to play it all over again, which he did before segueing into “The Night of Shanghai.” As he played, he remembered standing on the round tables of the teahouses, singing “Jasmine” to the rattling of coins and the offerings of tea and melon seeds, his mother and Aunt Swirl harmonizing with him, back when he first imagined that all the world was a song, a performance or a dream, that music was survival and could fill an empty stomach and chase the war away.
The students sang and shouted, and the driver thundered at them to keep it down, and the passengers below yelled cào dàn (Satan) and sent other furious epithets up at them, but these only dissipated harmlessly away. Kai suggested Sparrow play “Bird’s Eye View,” which was apt and also full of melancholy. He did, and Kai sang, and by the end of the tune, the affectionate girl at Sparrow’s side had tears in her velvety eyes, and he thought he could hear old people sobbing down in the belly of the bus.
The afternoon passed and twilight descended, slowly at first, then ever more quickly. Along the motorway, towns jumbled out into smaller and smaller buildings until finally the land won out, ever vast and golden and infinite. Now and then, a handful of passengers would leap off and someone else would climb up. In the fading light, he saw Kai watching him, and he felt the pianist’s hand on his shoulder, then the back of his neck, then along the thinness of his spine. The girl was pressed against Sparrow’s other arm and the clean sweetness of her hair radiated up a pensive fragrance, hopeful as a bouquet of winter flowers. The Party said that desire, like intellect and skill, was a tool for struggle. But love, if it served the smaller self before the greater one, the individual before the People, was a betrayal of revolutionary ideals, of love itself.
He watched the lowlands disappear, giving way to higher altitudes and drier winds. Quilts were unrolled, thermoses opened and wisps of steam plaited together and curled into the night sky. Sparrow slept under the protection of stars and a half moon, hidden by a cover he shared with Kai, in the warmth of the pianist’s arms.
—