She waited, watching him.
“Zhuli,” he said. He despised the quaver in his voice and pushed it down. “It was destroyed.” She nodded, as if waiting for the second half of the sentence. He looked at her helplessly. “It was destroyed.”
“It was,” she said. “But then…”
“Red Guards came yesterday, no, it was two days ago. They came and smashed all the instruments. They even came in here but Ba…we asked them to leave. Ba Lute was denounced, he had to go to a meeting but it’s finished now. He’s home. The Conservatory is closed. Maybe for good.”
Zhuli nodded. She seemed, to Sparrow, almost unbearably lucid.
“Where are Da Shan and Flying Bear?” she asked.
“In Zhejiang with Ba’s cousin. Mrs. Ma took them by train. You need to go as well–”
“Yes,” she said, and then so flippantly he didn’t quite believe she had spoken. “I should have studied agriculture after all. Cousin, haven’t you been listening to the radio? The campaign is everywhere. Zhejiang will be no different from here.”
He did not tell her that four professors at the Conservatory had killed themselves in the last week and that Professor Tan had been locked in a room without adequate food or light. Zhuli did not mention the denunciations Da Shan had written. A wave of chanting overran the streets but they acted as if they did not hear it. It moved along Beijing Road, circling them. Zhuli asked if he had seen Kai.
“I saw him two days ago. I couldn’t tell how he was.”
“But he’ll be protected, won’t he? Nobody will harm him. They won’t harm you.”
The feeling in her voice came from another time, an old longing that did not know how to fade. He didn’t know what to do but nod.
She closed her eyes. “I’m glad, cousin.”
When she spoke again, her voice was very calm. “I’m glad,” she said. She touched her hair again and then let it go. “It’s like morning when the stars are painted over by daylight, Sparrow. You think it’s very far away, all this light, and anyway there’s a great universe of stars and other things and so you never believe they’ll disappear…Sparrow, of all the things they say I am, they are right that I am proud. I was proud to be myself. I really did believe that one day I would play before the Chairman himself, that I would go to London and Moscow and Berlin!” She laughed, like a child at the antics of a little pet. “I know now. Those places will only ever be words to me. My pride was so great I imagined that I would stand in the room where Bach lived, I would see his handwriting, his rooms and his little bed, and I would show people what it meant to me. They would hear it. They would hear Bach in me, they would know that he was mine, too. I don’t know how, I don’t know why…”
The lucidity in Zhuli’s eyes frightened him.
“There’s a joke inside of it,” Zhuli said, “that’s why everyone laughs at me. Do you understand? All these things that we don’t have are nothing compared to the things we did have. A life can be long or short but inside it, if we’re lucky, is this one opening…I looked through this window and made my own idea of the universe and maybe it was wrong, I don’t know anymore, I never stopped loving my country but I wanted to be loyal to something else, too. I saw things…I don’t want the other kind of life.”
Sparrow stood and went to close the door that was already closed. He went to the window, which was latched tight, he drew the curtains and tried to think of what to do. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to Zhejiang. You won’t be alone. Flying Bear and Da Shan–”
“No,” she said. “It would only cause trouble for them.”
But what option was there? It was unbearable that there should be no escape. Think, he told himself, you must think clearly. The notebook, pen and cup beside the bed drew his attention, and he slid the pen aside and picked up the notebook. He was shaking. The sight of Wen the Dreamer’s handwriting disturbed him. Where was Big Mother, where was Swirl? They alone, not he or his father, knew how to protect her. He despised his own weakness. “Zhuli,” he said. “This disturbance will end. It must end.”
“My poor father. What will he feel when he comes home and sees what has happened to us all?”
He didn’t answer and Zhuli reached her hand to him, to the notebook. “I finished this one. Let’s continue. Chapter 17, it’s your favourite chapter, isn’t it? Here’s the box, under the bed. I had to hide it from Ba Lute.”
He lifted the box out. Zhuli combed her hands through her hair, as if preparing to receive a visitor. She said, “I have this idea that…maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived. That’s why it seems so familiar to us now. The future is arriving. We’ve come all this way to meet it.”
“Or maybe,” he said, “it’s we who keep returning to the same moment.”
“Next time, we’ll meet in another place, won’t we, Sparrow?”
“Yes, Zhuli.”
Sparrow read the chapter aloud as afternoon became evening, as if reading from the Book of Records was the same as shutting and bolting the outside door. Inside the room, Da-wei would soon leave America and return home, but before his departure, a composer named Chou brings him to a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. A hundred musicians radiate from the central figure of the conductor, Edgard Varèse, and, meanwhile, a second, smaller orchestra plays from an adjoining room. Alternating and colliding, audible but invisible to one another, they perform a single symphony using drums, alarms, scraps of song, sirens, a shouting flute, the bang and clank of metropolitan horns. The pandemonium of the symphony is the most beautiful thing Da-wei has ever heard. It seems simultaneously to include him and usher him on his way.
“Da-wei, you mustn’t go back,” Chou tells him afterwards. “It’s too late to return.”
Da-wei does not know how to answer. Before him, the orchestra has vacated the stage but their music stands wait like a flock of cranes.
“Myself,” Chou says, “I left Shanghai during the worst of the fighting. The Japanese pursued us, but we managed to disappear into a crowd…” His face, so alive in its story, turned grey. “The army apprehended another group, mistaking them for us. They rounded them up and shot them all. They were massacred…You see how it is. A life for a life. I can never go back.”
In the chamber, it feels as if all the hundreds of chairs are inclined towards them, listening.
“I tell you: our country has no need for us. You and I, we’re all yí mín, altered people, which is to say, we will soon be the most common people in existence.”
When the chapter ended, Zhuli took the notebook in her hands. She said, “I have never heard Varèse. I have heard so little modern music from the twentieth century. I wish, one day, I could go abroad and listen to what they’re hearing.” She said, as she if hadn’t realized until this moment, “Da-wei is the shadow of my father. All these years, because of the handwriting, I imagined he was writing to us directly. To me. It was never just a book, was it?…Sparrow, promise me. Don’t let Ba Lute burn the notebooks.”
“Yes, Zhuli. I promise.”