—
The glasses were emptied and the books packed away. So as not to attract attention, they left at intervals: the Old Cat and Ling, followed by San Li, Sparrow and finally the Professor. Kai, who was leaning against the wall by the door, touched Sparrow’s arm lightly as he passed through. In the hallway, Sparrow stood listening, but instead of the Professor or Kai, all he heard was the belligerent clamouring of the radio, of all the radios in the building. The entire city, he realized, would soon be deaf, and that would be the end of his musical career.
He wished that a week had already passed, and that he was, at this very moment, returning up the concrete stairs to Kai’s room. If only he were just now lifting his hand to knock, waiting to be allowed inside. Instead of leaving he might, at this moment, be arriving.
—
Early the next morning, when Zhuli entered Room 103, Tzigane became the only Shanghai. Hours later, she emerged humbled and electrified. The sky was blue-grey as if it had swallowed all the Mao coats in the city. She heard Ravel (Tzigane), Prokofiev (Sonata for Solo Violin No. 4) and Bach (Partita for Solo Violin No. 2), each on a separate channel as if she were standing between three concert halls. On Julu Road, cyclists seemed to branch out from the music itself; they disappeared in the fog of July sunshine. She walked east on Changde Road and west again. A line of tricycle carts, weighed down by oil drums, creaked north and commuters parted around them like shoals of fish, their trousers fluttering. Time slowed.
A woman shouted at her to get out of the way and a flatbed truck, crusted in mud, nearly knocked her down as it rushed by. “Are you deaf?” a little boy shouted. He was holding a stick for no reason. He ran away with his weapon. “Capitalist Miss!” a woman spat at her, but when Zhuli turned to look back, the woman was gone. On and on she walked until she found herself back at the Conservatory once more. The courtyard and the building were deserted, as if it were Spring Festival and all the musicians had gone home for the holidays.
Her footsteps echoed nervously in the empty hallways. She went up to Sparrow’s office, but when she knocked, no one answered.
On the third floor, her class, the orchestral class, appeared to be cancelled. Out of some fifty students, only six were present. Nobody looked up when she came in. The Professor, known as Go Slow, was missing. Eventually the other five students wandered off. The now empty room seemed to close in around her. An aimless inspection of her schoolbag revealed a copy of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which she had borrowed from the library days ago and had been carrying in her schoolbag without realizing. Zhuli opened it across six desks. The copy was dirty, smudged by pencil marks and eraser dust. Beethoven, she knew, had never intended for this concerto to have so feudal a name as “Emperor.” The name had attached itself long after his death. She followed the solo piano through its ascents and tumbling falls, and into the second movement, a B major dream and sorrow extending like a paper accordion.
If there was indeed an emperor in this concerto, she concluded, he was not a king at all, but a man with ambitions of greatness, an emperor in his own mind, a child who once imagined a different life but had come to see the disconnection between what he aspired to be and what he was capable of being. In 1811, when Beethoven was almost fully deaf, he performed this piano concerto, but the music that the composer heard in his mind failed to move his listeners. The performance was a disaster and, until his death, Beethoven rarely performed again. But what had mattered most in that moment, Zhuli wondered: the concerto in his mind or the concerto of his audience? What mattered most in this moment: the words on the posters or the lives–of her parents, of Ba Lute and Sparrow–in suspension, the promise of Mao Zedong thought or the day-to-day reality of New China? Which would win out, the Shanghai of utopia, or the city of the real?
She heard shouting. “Down! Down! Down!” they chanted. Footsteps thundered into the classrooms and stairwells. Furniture crashed above her head. Zhuli heard the strange dislocation of piano notes, she heard hammering and laughing and then, unmistakably, the smell of fire. She tucked the score in her bag, went out of the side door and into the courtyard, and hurried home.
—
That night, Ba Lute told her that she should cut her hair, that the long braid that slid against the small of her back was a symbol of vanity. “Cut it right to your chin,” her uncle said. “Why can’t you wear it like the other girls?” Zhuli felt a shiver of fear, but she agreed. “Here, I’ll do it for you,” he said anxiously. A rusty pair of scissors, normally used to cut chicken, already lay on the table. “No, uncle,” she said. “It’s too much trouble. I’ll ask my mother to cut it.”
“Your mother! But where is she? I’ve no idea where those two have gone! There hasn’t been a single letter or message.”
“Then I will wait.”
“Today, little Zhuli. We must do it today.”
He had lost weight and seemed to stand crookedly. His straw shoes made a weak, scraping noise against the floor.
“I will, uncle.”
When he had retreated, she saw her mother’s copy of the Book of Records on a chair beside the kindling, as if Ba Lute meant to burn it. Zhuli picked up the cardboard box and took it to her room. On the bed, she lifted the lid. She could not stop herself from withdrawing a notebook at random and opening it. Wen the Dreamer’s refined yet passionate script moved her all over again. Her parents seemed to rest in her hands, as if the novel had never been a mirror of the past, but of the present. What if Da-wei and May Fourth, separated for so many years, still wandered as exiles, and this was the reason the novel could not be finished? Missing her parents, Zhuli followed her father’s handwriting down the page. In the story, Da-wei lay awake in his New York dormitory as jazz and German lullabies crowded through the rooms, men argued and women laboured, a child wept in its newfound English, new to Da-wei as well, and he marvelled at everything he might one day understand. Month after month, he worked odd jobs. He repeatedly mended his cap and padded coat, thinking that soon, tomorrow, his life would be reinvented. Lonely and bored, he copied pages from The Travels of Lao Can, the only book he had carried from China until, on a desolate spring day, he ran out of paper. He sat staring at the iron beauty of the Hudson River, remembering a passage from a famous Lu Xun essay:
“What’s the use of copying those?” a friend had asked Lu Xun.
“There’s no use.”
“In that case, what’s your reason for copying them?”
“There’s no reason.”
What was the purpose, Da-wei finally asked himself, of copying a life but erasing himself?
When Zhuli woke, she was alone and in Shanghai once more. It was morning but still dark and she felt an extraordinary peace, a calm willingness to give in to the destiny of her life. Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2 rang in her head as if she had been practising in her sleep. She returned Chapter 16 to the Book of Records, and hid the cardboard box beneath her bed. In the kitchen, she saw the chicken scissors on the table and she put them in her bag. Outside, the air was wonderfully cool. She felt that everyone was awake but no one spoke; the shutters were closed, but all the neighbours watched. The scissors made her feel strong and prepared for all eventualities. She passed a wall that was covered in meticulously flowing calligraphy: