“I don’t blame him. A child of the countryside, you see, doesn’t easily glorify the countryside. But because of the Professor’s friends, my thinking has changed. Shanghai, I’ve come to realize, is not big enough for me and will never satisfy all the questions of my soul. I have split into too many people. I blame the priests, who instilled in me the idea of a better world, and the faith that I was destined for greater things. I blame the Professor, too, who once opened my mind but is now limited by nostalgia for the past. I want to make my parents and my sisters proud. I want to rise higher still. Do you feel as I do, Teacher? Your music has meant everything to me, it showed me…I ask myself why your symphonies are never performed, and I think it’s because they make us feel so much, they make us question not only who we are, but who we aim to be. Fou Ts’ong has married the daughter of Yehudi Menuhin, he plays the piano from London to Berlin, and yet his parents are criticized as bourgeois elements. We pianists are not to follow his example despite everything he has accomplished. But surely we would better serve the People if we were part of the greater world. Why shouldn’t your music be celebrated in Moscow or Paris or New York?”
The young man spoke with complete confidence, a childlike determination that seemed to Sparrow like a residue from another time. And yet, like some of the other students Kai’s age, he also spoke as if there was no distinction between teacher and student, father and son, no formality. They had been born only ten years apart, Sparrow thought, but it was as if they had grown up in different centuries.
“My music…” Sparrow said finally. “When I was young, all I wanted was to write my music. Nothing more. And that is still what I feel.”
“I hear something else in your compositions. I hear a gap between what you say and what you desire. The music is asking for something more…I’m certain we are the same.” He turned and looked directly into Sparrow’s eyes. “I no longer wish to live with restraints, Teacher. I wish to cast off the ordinary. The Professor has come to fear the Revolution. I do not. I wish the awakening of our times to waken me as well. We can’t simply learn from Western art and music, we also need to examine and criticize our daily experience and our own thought. We shouldn’t be afraid of our own voices. The time has come to speak what’s really in our minds.”
The bus came at that moment and Sparrow was saved from having to respond.
—
They spent the first two days in the villages outside Wuhan collecting music and two days in Wuhan City itself, including an afternoon at the gong and cymbal factory. Each time Sparrow delicately mentioned the name Comrade Glass Eye, his inquiry was met with confusion or curiosity, but mostly indifference. On the fifth day, however, a stranger approached them as they sat in the Red Opera Teahouse.
He was a compact man in his late sixties with a big, shiny head and the cloaked eyes of a gambler. “Comrades,” he said, “we were on the same bus from Nanjing. What a pleasure it is to meet you again! Tell me, how long will you stay in Wuhan?”
“At least another day and night,” Sparrow said.
“I’m glad to hear it, and by the way, Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the incomparable Communist Party!” His throat crackled when he said the words and he had to stop and cough in between. “Last night, my little niece told me she heard Shanghai musicians performing at the Small Peach Garden and I knew it must be you.” He flicked open his fan as if snapping open a knife. “Hot, isn’t it? Wuhan, you know, the furnace of the South.” As he waved the fan in slow, brutal strokes, he recounted how, before the war, he had lived in Shanghai and studied the violin briefly with Tan Hong. “By the way, my name is Old Huang, but please address me as Jian, as my friends do. Not the jiān that means ‘flounder’ but jiān as in the mythical bird with one eye and one wing.” He pulled his chair closer towards them and whispered, full of emotion, “Please tell me about my dear friend Tan Hong. Does he still teach at the Shanghai Conservatory?”
They spent half the morning eating melon seeds and discussing the state of music.
Jian invited them to stay with him. “It’s a simple room,” he said, lifting his right arm and fanning the top of his head. “Hardly fit for two celebrated musicians such as yourselves, but the garden has fine acoustics. When I heard you on the bus, I realized that it’s been far too long since I heard anyone play the erhu with such articulated feeling. And if I may be frank, Comrade Sparrow, I feel I already know you. Last year at the Wuhan Cultural Palace, visiting musicians performed your String Quintet in C Major. It is an understatement of unforgivable proportions to say that your compositions enraptured me. Truly, such intricate counterpoint and depth of feeling is unusual in these times. Please honour me with your presence!”
Sparrow accepted on their behalf.
In Jian’s dwelling, after a lunch of fiery noodles, they sat in the shade of a parasol tree and smoked. Sparrow felt grateful for the sun touching the top of his head and the tops of his knees, for the pale yet bitter tea and the fragrant sponge cake that Jian had divided into two large pieces, with one tiny sliver for himself. His thoughts turned inward and he settled on the composition lecture he wanted to give on revolutionary expressionism, Sch?nberg’s Treatise on Harmony, and Tcherepnin’s essay on folk music’s eternal line. “Developing variation,” he would begin, quoting Sch?nberg, “means that we begin with a basic unit, and from this unit elaborate the idea of a piece. As composers, keep in mind fluency, contrast, variety, logic and unity, on the one hand, and character, mood, expression on the other….”
Just then, Jian slapped his head as if he had forgotten to put out the brazier. He ran out and, when he returned, he carried a very old, astonishingly beautiful violin. He offered it to Kai who in turn handed it to Sparrow, who accepted it with solemnity. Under the elderly man’s watchful gaze, Sparrow tuned the instrument. He felt the thinness of the strings and the fragility of the violin’s body. What music would best suit an instrument of this pedigree and seniority, he wondered. He wiped the strings down and considered the possibilities. Finally, he lifted the instrument and played the opening aria from Handel’s Xerxes, and then Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words.” The violin was worldly-wise and expressive. Sparrow glanced at Jian. Their host sat in the shadows and remembered and smiled and seemed to grow young again.
When Sparrow finished, he offered the violin back to its owner.
“Now that we are familiar as brothers,” Jian said, accepting it, “may I ask what brings you to Wuhan? I assume it is not just to see the renowned Guqin Terrace.” His broad forehead caught the afternoon light in a melancholic way.
“Comrade Kai and I are collecting folk songs from Hebei Province.” After a moment, he added, “And, if circumstances allow, I’m looking for a friend of my family.”
Jian nodded. He allowed Sparrow’s trust to rest in the air for a moment before answering. “Tell me the friend’s name and perhaps I can assist you. You see, I work in the town planning office, and keep track of all the permits, births, deaths, promotions, demotions and rehabilitations. I am the keeper of all the numbers in this town, and know them horizontally, vertically and upside down. Our world is made of numbers,” the old man said and smiled sadly, “and long may the fires of Revolution burn.”
“I know this friend only as Comrade Glass Eye.”
Jian took up the violin, thinking. He played an echo of Handel’s Xerxes, and then held a low E / D-sharp while leaning forward in his chair. “I have a friend who suits that description but does not normally carry that name. You look surprised,” Jian said, smiling, “but this is not so surprising because, as you know, I’m called Jian, after the one-eyed bird. This left eye, you see, is made of glass, and I have worn a prosthetic eye ever since I was a teenager.” Jian half turned his face so that he looked first at Sparrow, then at Kai, with his glass eye. Sparrow leaned towards it, mesmerized. “My friend’s name is Teacher Ai Di Sheng and he has made my glass eye ever since I lost the original. But then, in 1958, during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, he was labelled a rightist and sent to a reform-through-labour camp in the Northwest. A year after he was detained, my only glass eye was stolen! I was devastated. I preferred to starve and die rather than to show my empty eye cavity in this town. For many years, I wore a scarf to hide the wound. There is no eye left behind, you see.”