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In the pre-dawn darkness, Zhuli went to the Conservatory to return the score of Beethoven’s “Emperor.” The library was locked and she found herself inside Room 103, a room she had never entered before without her violin. There was no one around. She closed the door, sat down on the floor and rested for a long time. She had a desire to stop time moving so quickly. The previous night, Zhuli had stayed awake rereading Chairman Mao’s talk on art and literature, but each time she felt a truth might be appearing, it muddied and broke away. The Chairman’s words were elegant, perfectly sharp, but when they touched her thoughts, they became crooked. Unable to sleep, she had written a long self-criticism, but it was not the kind that the Party demanded. Instead, the same reactionary words kept rising to the surface and dirtying the page.
“Who am I at the base of things?”
“Do I have the ability to change?”
Say all you know, the Chairman had written, and say it without reserve.
“But there is more and more that I question! I’m afraid to hear what I think. I know that the Party is right in all things. I say it is right but even the simplest truths don’t seem like truths at all.”
We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the old world, we are also good at building the new.
“What if the new is nothing but a virus of the same sickness? And what about devotion, what about duty and filial love? Must everything that is old be contemptible? Weren’t we also something before?”
Why are you defending a musical culture that is not your own?
She pinched her hands and the pain shot all the way to her neck. “Enough of these thoughts! They’re all useless because at the base somewhere I know what the Party says is right. Only I’m so selfish, so selfish…”
She heard scuffling nearby. Zhuli stood. A low moaning was coming from the cellars in the basement. Had someone been down there this entire time? Her body began to tremble. No, she told herself, her mind was troubled, she’d hardly slept. Still, she heard someone moaning in pain. Room 103 struck her, for the first time, as an echo of the underground library. Zhuli left the room, rushed up the stairs and out into the warm air. It was still early, still dark outside, as if the counting of time had paused and was only now being restarted again.
She had the family’s oil and grain coupons in her pocket and she walked in a daze, her hand over the opening, hiding them and protecting them. Since Big Mother and Swirl’s departure, it had been her responsibility to pick up the rations.
The queue for oil had already reached Julu Road. When she saw how long the line would take, her distraction turned into guilt. She should have come here first thing. It had been a mistake to go to the Conservatory, she had known better and yet, once again, she had followed stupidity and selfishness. She took her place at the end of the line, behind a girl who wore nothing on her feet and whose eyes were squeezed shut. The cut of her hair was as blunt as an anvil. Nobody spoke. Every building was shrouded in red banners. A broken chair lay in the road beside a length of rope caked in what looked like ink. Three phrases swung together in her thoughts: Party-mindedness, people-mindedness, ideological content. It is my thinking, Zhuli thought. Everything correct becomes something poisoned. If only I could quiet my thoughts. She felt as if she hadn’t closed her eyes in days.
Distribution wouldn’t begin for another hour. Perhaps, if she was lucky, she would reach the front of the line by noon. If they ran out of oil, she would come again the next day. She would give in, she would forget the Conservatory and walk away. A weight lifted from her shoulders at this thought. “Yes,” she said, startling the girl beside her. She was addressing these thoughts to Kai, but the thoughts no longer seemed like hers. “There is always tomorrow and the day after and the day after. It is not too late to reform and grow.”
Around her, people, buildings, objects all appeared disproportionately large, not only their substance but their shadows too. Had there ever been such a light-filled July? She saw now that she was standing beside a wall covered in posters. “Denounce the…” “Destroy the…” “Rise up and…eradicate…shame.” The words, written in colossal characters of red ink, buzzed in her thoughts. “Bombard the headquarters!” It sounded like a game that Flying Bear and Da Shan had invented. How odd it must feel to write violent words in such orderly calligraphy. Zhuli shook the thought away. Dissonance required as precise a technique as beauty. In her mind, Prokofiev’s libretto kept repeating: The philosophers have tried in different ways to explain the world; the point is to change it. Prokofiev quoted Marx, the Red Guards quoted Chairman Mao, everyone shouted borrowed ideas, her classmates memorized the Chairman’s slogans and adopted his poetry as their own. So we are not so different from one another after all, Zhuli thought, except that I speak in the language of Bach and the musical ideas of Prokofiev but still, none of us knows the true nature of our voices, no matter the cause, none of us speaks with our own words. At the core, is there only desire but no justice? All we’ve learned since the fall of the old dynasties is how to amplify the noise.
This noise was splitting inside her now. She heard Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3, as if from the air itself. Her own voice wept, “There is always tomorrow and the day after. It must not be too late.”
The line nudged forward.
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