—
Nearly three thousand kilometres away, Wen the Dreamer arrived in Yumen City, Gansu Province. Since his escape from Jiabangou, he had crossed and recrossed the Northwest for nearly two years, no longer the same bookish young man with poems folded into his pocket. In his mid-forties, darkened by the sun and burned by the wind, old before his time, he was lithe, alert and physically toughened. He stole the identity cards of passing strangers, thereby changing his name on a monthly basis; he stopped, when necessary, to earn money or ration coupons by working in a wheat or millet field, or a cement factory. With his battered suitcase, he crossed and recrossed the desert, learning how to live in the dry moonscape of Gansu Province, how to evade capture and how to exist on air alone. One day, he found, in a book barrow in Xinjiang, a copy of Chapter 6 of the Book of Records. He stared at the pages, fearing that he was lost. Hallucinating that Da-wei, May Fourth and the Book of Records was a myth, an allegory or a system around which all their lives were knotted. Seeing his distress, the child tending the book barrow said, “My father read that book, he got it from our cousin. He doesn’t have the whole book though, just a few chapters. This one’s extra. He won’t sell the rest.”
“Where does your cousin live?”
The child raised her faint eyebrows. “Jinchang. He works in the nickel mine.”
That night, Wen read the notebook without a pause, devouring it as if it were a plate of food, convinced with each turning of the page that he knew the handwriting and would always know it. In this copy, a secondary character’s name had been altered: the copyist had used the character 谓 which was the wei of Wei River, whose source was in Gansu Province.
He travelled to Jinchang, a town made curious by its scattered buildings of foreign design, said to be the ruins of Roman-style houses left by a thousand exiled soldiers who settled there two thousand years ago. Their descendants were occasionally born with green eyes and startling red hair. These days, the town was more famous for its nickel and precious metals. In Jinchang, he found another chapter, also mimeographed, dated only six weeks previous, and using the same code. The owner of the book barrow was reticent, but finally he confided that he received the chapter from a honeydew farmer in Lanzhou. Wen the Dreamer followed the trail, down half a dozen roads and chapters until, one day, he knocked at the door of Notes from the Underground, the plant and flower clinic of the Lady Dostoevsky.
“My dear man,” the Lady said. “It’s about time. I was sure I would be dead by the time you finally got here.”
She told him that Swirl was in Yumen City with her sister, where the two women worked in the local song and dance troupe. As he left, she pressed into his hand the copy of The Rain on Mount Ba, which had once belonged to his daughter and still had Zhuli’s handwriting in the margins.
A week later, Wen the Dreamer appeared in Yumen, thin as a spear of grass. He came to the simple dwelling Lady Dostoevsky had described, where Swirl lived with Big Mother Knife. Lamplight flickered behind the curtain. He stood outside with his suitcase for a long time, afraid to let her see him, afraid to imagine the cessation of his loneliness, afraid of the future and also the past. He remembered how he used to watch Swirl’s window in Shanghai, waiting for the lamp to be extinguished so that he could deliver a new chapter of the Book of Records. A lifetime ago. Two lifetimes. Now all the copies held a record of the places they’d been, the places they’d been forced to leave. He had tried to clip his hair, to clean himself and mend his clothes, but still he felt the uncrossable sea between who he was and who he might have been.
When he tapped lightly on the frame of the window, Swirl came to the door and opened it. She stared at him as if at an apparition.
Wen the Dreamer recited the famous line of Li Bai: “See the waters of the Yellow River leap down from Heaven, roll away to the sea, never to turn again.”
“Destined,” Swirl answered, “to return in a swirl of dust.”
Big Mother, who was standing behind Swirl at the door, came out. Calmly, as if he came by every evening, she embraced him. And then she wrapped herself in a sweater and left them alone. She walked for a long time along the nearby ridge. Lamps from the oil refinery illuminated a web of nighttime workers. The sky was dark purple, filled with foreboding. When Big Mother returned, she saw her sister and Wen standing side by side in the shadows of the house. The stars were dimming and she had the sense that the night sky was loosening from the earth and lifting away. Not once did Big Mother see them bend or move, let alone touch one another. After having been separated for a decade, they stood so lightly, as if the ground itself could not be trusted. Maybe they talked about how, in a house like Ba Lute’s, in the home of a Party hero, their daughter might have a chance to thrive. Maybe they spoke not of Zhuli, but of something else entirely, of other intimacies and unwritten lives. It was for the wind to hear, Big Mother later told Sparrow, and not for the likes of her.
Wen the Dreamer and Swirl left in the night, in a bid to escape to the borderlands. Mongolia could be reached in two days, and Wen had contacts who could help them on the other side.
The following morning, Big Mother began a letter to Zhuli, her good eye right up to the page. She would find a way to send it, along with letters from Swirl and Wen, once she felt it was safe to do so. My heart has been heavy all day long, she thought, remembering the poem she had recited at her sister’s wedding. Your elder sister has looked out for you. And now you are both crying and cannot part, Yet it is right that you should go on….
In the letter to Zhuli, she wrote, “I watched them depart on one small horse. Can you imagine? As if they were young again.” Her tears wrinkled the page. She folded the letter and hid the words away. That evening, she went to the local Party secretary and told them her sister had slipped and fallen into the Wei River. She had tried to save Swirl, but the current had been too strong, the fetid water, polluted with waste from the factories, had carried her away. The Party secretary convened a search team. After five days, with no sign of the body and anxious about rising production quotas and the new political campaign, he pronounced Swirl dead, signed her papers and closed her file.
—
In Shanghai, Sparrow was taken away by Red Guards and for a week they had no word of him. A different group came for Zhuli on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then left her alone until Sunday. Sunday was the worst and the Red Guards came again on Monday. On Tuesday, Sparrow came home, starving and exhausted, but unharmed. He’d been held in isolation in a storage room and then let go. It was inexplicable. On the streets, loudspeakers blared from every corner. The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers. In the middle of the broadcast, Red Guards entered the house. Despite Sparrow’s begging, despite his grip on Zhuli, they took her. Her hand slipped out of his. In truth, the fear in Sparrow’s voice had so terrified her, Zhuli had closed her eyes and pulled her hand free.
At first, Zhuli’s classmates had been inventive. They had new slogans and methods, they had new implements like garbage pails, conductor’s batons and razors. There was a comedic quality to it all, one laugh crashing down onto the next, explosive laughter, barbed laughter, tripwire laughter, questions that were not questions, the confessions they wanted that had nothing to do with confession.
On and on they sang:
The water of socialism nourished me, I grew up beneath the Red Flag
I took the oath,
To dare to think, to speak up, to act,