—
She became aware of movement and felt there was a great deal of space around her, a darkness that she took for asphalt, the road, or nighttime. Where were her arms? They seemed to have detached from her body and fallen away. “My fingers have gone to gather my hair,” she thought, wanting to smile, “they have gone to pick up my beautiful hair.” It was useless to try to open her eyes. They were crusted shut and she had nothing to hold on to but a stabbing pain that seemed to come from deep in her lungs. Piano music came, unidentifiable. How near it was but no, the music was a prank. Who played the piano in times like these? “Oh,” she thought as a trickle of water touched her eyes and then her lips, “my good hands have brought me water.” She heard an echoing and then it was as if the air changed pitch, a fog gave way to rain, rain shaded into tone, tone into voices. And then one voice in particular, which she knew immediately and impossibly to be Kai. “No,” she thought, the pain in her lungs increasing, “it is not good to fall into his hands.” Again the sensation of movement. Then the road came away from her skin. Kai was with her. At the bottom of all these tangled impressions she glimpsed a changed idea, another way of loving someone that she had not experienced before, an attachment like that to a brother, to a friend, to a lover who could never be her lover, of a musical soulmate, a companion who might have been a lifelong collaborator. “It is a great pity,” she thought, “that we will never have the chance to play Tzigane together because we brought something to it that had never been heard before. David Oistrakh himself would have recognized us; it is the truthfulness and the shame, no, the solitude, that comes from being at odds with oneself. It is loneliness. Only that, Kai,” she thought. Yes, if only it were Kai.
“Yes, Zhuli,” he said. “The Red Guards have all gone now.”
There was no more time. She was moving and yet she was still on the road. She was kneeling and yet she was lying in a dark, humid room. She heard Ba Lute, she heard Flying Bear crying, and Kai saying that two of the women targeted in the struggle session were still on the road, they were dead. One, a professor of mathematics at Jiaotong, had been dragged along the pavement for a kilometre. Zhuli pushed the noise out, it was coming at her not through her ears, but through a breeze against her arms, her hands. Someone washed her, she knew it could only be Sparrow. She knew she was safe and could now open her eyes if she chose to, but she did not choose to. Silence had come to her. It did not try to connect all its pieces, to pretend they were part of the same thing. It didn’t need to pretend. Silence saw everything, owned everything, eventually took everything.
Red Guards came to the house. She heard them coming nearer and nearer, they came in and things fell down, more shouting, they saw her and said they would come back. Someone was crying. It was the neighbour, Mrs. Ma, she cried, “Shame, shame!” but at whom? Zhuli didn’t know, she was afraid to guess. Shame was a corkscrew inside her, winding together the selfishness, the frivolity, the hollowness of what she was, until there was no more possibility of change.
In the next existence, Zhuli decided, there would be more colours than in the human world, there would be more textures and varieties of time. This would be the world of Beethoven as he sat with his back to the audience, when he understood that sound was immaterial, it was nothing but an echo, the true music had always been inside. But take away music, take away words, and what would persist? One of her ears had been damaged. She longed for her mother and father. How brightly the core of herself flickered before her, just out of reach. What are you, she asked. Where are you?
She sat up and realized it was night. She sat up again and again, imagining herself pushing aside the sheet, walking to the doorway, to the outer room, to the fresh air outside.
—
Sparrow heard his cousin waking. He had fallen asleep in a chair beside her bed. She had already left the room and turned down the hallway before he fully opened his eyes. He could not move. She would see the posters that were drying on the kitchen table. Da Shan and Flying Bear had been forced to criticize Zhuli, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, and these denunciations would be pasted up in the morning. “Call her the daughter of rightist filth,” Ba Lute had instructed. “You have to. Just write it down. Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing, only words.”
Da Shan smudged the ink, and his father threw out the poster and made him do it again.
“Da Shan,” he said, “if you don’t denounce Zhuli, they’ll only make it worse for her. They’ll turn around and says she’s a demon, that she infiltrated our lives. Let them humble us, if that’s what they want. Isn’t it better to be humbled? Do you want your poor father, your brothers, to lose their lives?”
Trembling, the teenager dipped his brush. Carefully, he wrote Zhuli’s name.
Ba Lute had now been summoned to the Conservatory twice, where the struggle sessions had lasted a full twelve hours. Their neighbour, Mr. Ma, had disappeared, and so had Zhuli’s teacher, Tan Hong. “The criticism I receive is very light, compared to the others,” Ba Lute said, when he returned. He had bruises all over his body. One eye was swollen shut and his face was bloodied and lopsided, but his accusers, his own pupils at the Conservatory, had left his hands alone. People who had been labelled rightists in earlier campaigns, even those who, like Swirl, had been rehabilitated, were far less fortunate.
Twice, Sparrow had been taken away by a group of Red Guards. They had locked him in a storeroom at the Conservatory but nobody had come to criticize him or denounce him. Eventually the door was opened and he was sent away. It was as if he floated underwater, inside a bubble of air. On the streets, the students sang and wept and shouted their love. The targets who had been humiliated once were humiliated again and again, as if a familiar face elicited the most hatred, they were the ones to blame for the receding promise of modernity, the violent sacrifices of revolution, this malevolence that seemed to infect the very young. Only it was not malevolence, it was courage and they were loyal soldiers defending the Chairman. Sparrow had to protect Zhuli, he had to finding a hiding place, but where? His father had said the violence was most extreme at the universities. The radio proclaimed that, in Beijing, the writer Fou Lei, once celebrated for his translations of Balzac and Voltaire, was being subjected to daily struggle sessions alongside his wife. The family’s books had all been burned and the piano destroyed. Their son, the pianist Fou Ts’ong, had applied for and received political asylum in the West. The father, Fou Lei, the quiet traitor, the poisonous needle wrapped in a silk cover, was finally being called to account.
The morning grew hotter. When Sparrow woke again, Zhuli was sitting in bed, under the window. She had left a space for her mother, as if Swirl might arrive home at any moment. With her hair cut off, she looked even younger than she was.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can go back to sleep.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” He sat up in his chair, rubbed his face, pushing his uneasy dreams away. “No, I was only thinking.”
“I’m fine now, and I know when you’re telling fibs.”
He smiled. One hand drifted up to the opposite arm, rising to her shoulder, finding the ends of her hair.
“Six months,” Zhuli said in a low voice, “and everything will grow back.” She gazed at him, and the dark smudges on her face, the bruising which had turned a sickly yellow, made her appear shadowed despite the sunlight in the room. “Sparrow, have you seen my violin?”
“Your violin,” he said stupidly.