“I’ve interrupted you,” Kai said, shifting closer. His eyes seemed perilously bright. “I’ve come with all my problems as usual and here you are, always working. You’re the only one I know whose attachment to music is completely pure. You’re the one who deserves to go abroad.”
“No,” Sparrow said. He didn’t know how to answer. “It’s no interruption. Actually, I was thinking of you.” His Symphony No. 3 lay on his desk, the first three movements taped roughly together, beside a copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records. His pencil had rolled off the table and now lay on the floor. Sparrow picked it up and placed it carefully across the pages.
“Teacher Sparrow, we rely on each other, don’t we? Even though we don’t judge things the same way, we understand one another. I don’t know when I began to trust you. I know we’re the same.”
Sparrow had stepped to the side, opening a distance between them. He kept turning away, out of shyness and confusion.
“I know I must sound selfish to you,” Kai said. “I’m honestly worried about the Professor. So many people have come and gone from his study groups and everyone knows his views, he takes no pains to hide them, he says things that could be misunderstood and he’s blind to the consequences…”
On the desk, the pencil was rolling from side to side as if in the gutter of the sidewalk. Sparrow put his hand down to still it. “I’d like to hear those pieces you mentioned,” he said. “It’s been so long since I properly listened to them.” He went to Old Wu’s record player and picked out Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5.
He knelt down, lifted the plastic lid, and shifted the record from its cover. The disc, a recording made by Glenn Gould, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was in near perfect condition. He had not listened to it in some time.
Kai had picked up Chapter 17 and was reading the first page.
Sparrow set the needle down as carefully if he were setting it in the palm of a child’s hand. At a very early age, Sparrow thought, his mind rambling, he had known that he would not be a performer, he did not have the genius of interpretation, even if he played well enough. Sparrow’s gifts were of a different temperament. There was music inside him, it was as simple, inexplicable and exhilarating as that. Music overflowed from everything he saw. If it ended, he would have no idea how to make sense of the world. The record began to spin and the first sound was the sound of air. This was a room in America, he thought, perhaps a studio or a concert hall. Perhaps, he thought, technology was what had made Zhuli and Kai both naive and ambitious, they had grown up kneeling before record players and radios, they had been lulled into believing there were no barriers between themselves and the sound itself. The ubiquity of recording had made them all equal: they heard the same recording that Gould himself listened to when he placed the record on a turntable, they heard what an American or a Frenchman or a German heard. Geography, ethnicity or nationality were not the determining factors; the degree of your listening was what set your experience apart, your intimacy with music was all that mattered, your attentiveness and your desire. But was it true? What if true understanding was something innate, something they could never attain? The music began, the first heroic chords.
There were days in my life, he thought, that I passed over as though they were nothing and there are moments, seconds, when everything comes into focus.
Kai was sitting beside him now, still holding the notebook. Sparrow distracted himself by thinking about Bach. Between the thousands of pieces the composer left behind, had Bach ever known silence? Surely never. How was it possible for Bach to feel so much and not to shy away from it? But in my life, Sparrow thought, I think there is a quiet coming now. He felt so certain of it that a sharp pain spread across his chest. A deep silence was about to arrive. How could he live with it?
“Chairman Mao is right,” Kai was saying. “Somewhere along the way, the ideas of the older generation became corrupted. People like the Professor started off wanting to build a just society but then they got comfortable. They became decadent and felt they’d given up enough, and the rules applied to everyone but them. So what are we supposed to do? Everything they’ve taught me contradicts itself. Maybe they told more lies than truth.”
“What the Party wants is always changing,” Sparrow said quietly.
“I don’t agree. Either we accept the old world where we as a nation are weak and humiliated or we try again and make a better country. I know how unjust it was. Sometimes I think I have no right to be here. I ask myself why I alone among my family was saved…What about my sisters, my parents? Weren’t they equal citizens?…When justice shifts, nobody can be left as they were. Isn’t that so? Hasn’t Chairman Mao always seen much further than we are able to?”
They were sitting as near to one another as possible without touching. The music filled the space between them, its motifs turning over as if the composer had no conclusion, only movements that came around in a spiral, rising each time to a new beginning but an old place.
“Is this a novel?” Kai said, returning Chapter 17 to him.
“It’s a story that’s been in my family for many years.” The notebook was so worn, and the weight utterly familiar in Sparrow’s hand.
“Do you think I could read it one day?”
Sparrow nodded.
Kai continued as if speaking to himself. “Not now but one day. That’s what I hope for. I wasn’t trying to flatter you, Sparrow. A talent like yours comes along only once in a generation. You must finish your Symphony No. 3, no matter what happens.”
At some point they fell asleep on the floor. He woke to the heaviness of Kai’s arm over him. It was hot, and sometime in the night, Kai had taken off his shirt and now lay, half undressed, beside him. How thin he had grown. Kai held him tightly, his mouth against Sparrow’s neck, his breathing calm and undisturbed, but he was not asleep. Sparrow lay on his back and let his hand drift down to cover Kai’s. The pianist caressed him, tentatively at first and then with greater confidence. Sparrow’s hand followed Kai’s hand and an unbearable heat settled deep into his body. They lay together, frightened, half wishing sleep would come and take them, and release them from this aching, intolerable yearning. They drifted and woke and held one another, and in the fitfulness of Kai’s touch, he felt as loved as he had ever felt. The first wash of dawn arrived without his noticing.
—
That evening, the study group met in the Old Cat’s apartment, located in a twisting lane on the northwest side of the city. Sparrow had been pleased when, in the afternoon, Kai came to the laneway house to remind him of the meeting. He had been surprised when Kai invited Zhuli as well, though not as surprised as his cousin. Zhuli, blushing, had agreed.
They were the last to arrive. Just as before, the group assessed his clothing (“Did you trip and fall into the Huangpu River?”) and manner (“Nervous. As if he has thorns in his shoes.”) To Zhuli, on the other hand, they were welcoming, even familial. “Welcome, welcome!” the Old Cat shouted. “No need to be so formal. Just call me Old Cat, everyone does.” Kai greeted them both, but his eyes stayed fixed on Zhuli, who seemed oblivious of him. He had removed the armband of the Red Guards.
“I used to own the Perilous Heights bookshop on Suzhou Creek Road,” the Old Cat said, splashing tea into a bowl and slapping it down in front of Zhuli. “But during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the government was banning titles left and right. There was so much overthrowing go on, I couldn’t take it. Hell, I’m fifty years old. A relic! Overthrow me too hard and I won’t get up. So in 1955 I closed the shop and moved everything here.”
“But to keep so many books…” Zhuli said. “Aren’t you worried about busybodies?”
“What can I do? The pages are absorbent. I need them to soundproof my walls.”