Beside Sparrow, the young woman sighed as if wishing to propel herself onto the stage where the musicians were now filing out in solemn rows.
The Central Philharmonic wore their everyday clothing, grey or blue slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirts. Sparrow’s heart was beating so oddly, he felt it was detaching from his body. The sound of the orchestra tuning chilled him; strings, woodwinds and brass made their simultaneous climb or descent to a sustained A, and an oboe fluttered up the scale like a thought set loose. Sparrow had not seen a score since 1968, and the ones used by the Philharmonic appeared to be hand-copied. The music stands, too, were makeshift, held together by tape, string and wooden splints. He felt the clattering tap of Li Delun’s baton on the music stand as if the conductor had rapped on Sparrow’s own spine.
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony rose in a tentative hum.
The house lights had remained up and every face in the audience, every small reaction, was visible. No one fidgeted. On stage, the musicians leaned forward, as if they were sliding across the same tilting boat. A bright red banner gave way at one corner, “Premier Zhou Enlai lives forever in our hearts.” It folded diagonally but didn’t fall.
Danger seemed to come from every side. The young woman’s hands were covering her face and he wanted desperately to take them and place them in her lap. You must not let them see, he thought. If they see that you are devoted to it, they will take it from you.
The reverie of the first movement sharpened to a hallucinatory edge. Sparrow silenced the music by thinking about Mahler himself. Late in life, the composer had discovered, in German translation, the poets Li Bai and Wang Wei, and their poetry had provided the text for Mahler’s song symphony, “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth). The poems had been translated into French, and then into German, and from there Mahler had made his own additions so that the poems, copies of mistranslated copies, were almost untraceable to their beginnings. But some were known, including Wang Wei’s “Farewell,” familiar to everyone of his and his mother’s generation, even if they no longer recited the lines. “At odds with the world, return to rest by the south hill…”
Over the next hour, Sparrow succeeded in pushing away the sound of the orchestra. It was warm in the hall and his shirt was damp, the damp hardening to an icy cold.
There was no intermission. As the piano was being wheeled out for Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, Li Delun came to the microphone again. “We dedicate this Concerto No. 5 to our resurrected comrade, He Luting, President of the Shanghai Conservatory,” he said. “Long live Chairman Deng! Long live the Communist Party of China! Long live our country!” In the hall, surprise and consternation but also sustained applause and even, Sparrow thought, cautious jubilation. Amidst the noise Kai came forward and took his seat at the piano. It was small, the kind a well-to-do family might have kept in their home before the Cultural Revolution. It was the first piano Sparrow had seen since 1966.
Kai sat with his back rigidly straight. He had no score in front of him. Sparrow could see where his trousers, cuffed unevenly, lifted to expose his ankles. The pianist waited, both hands on his thighs, as the concerto opened in controlled exclamations, vibrating across the auditorium. Kai began, traversing the scales with a familiar clarity, only the tips of his body–head, fingers and feet–moving. Inside Sparrow’s head, multiple versions played; he simultaneously saw the performance and heard a memory, a recording. He listened to the immense space between then and now. When the allegro began, Sparrow closed his eyes. Up and down the scales again, as if Kai were telling him there is no way out, there is only the path back again, and even when we think we’re free, we only endlessly return. The concerto’s beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body. He remembered, long ago, playing Flying Bear’s violin for Zhuli. Beside him, the young woman’s eyes were glassy with tears that did not fall. Sparrow could not imagine weeping openly. He inhaled and found himself, against his will, listening. Near the end of the movement, the first, jubilant chords repeated, but the notes no longer conveyed the original feeling. Underneath was an ending, a buried movement, the sound of one life held captive by another. The concerto swept on, never pausing to dwell on its own astonishing constructions.
On stage, the first violinist played with his whole body and then, suddenly, as if remembering the audience, he closed up again. Sparrow tried to place Zhuli before him. Beneath the violin, her supporting arm had always appeared so pale. He remembered her humility before the music, even as a child she had felt accountable to it. The notes went on, as if living another life. He could have followed Kai to Beijing. But he had never known how to write music, to perform music, and yet be silent.
Tumultuous applause swept over him. Kai stood, all the musicians stood, their white shirts, damp with sweat, feathery against their bodies. The encores came.
Sparrow saw the young woman staring straight ahead and he recognized in her an ambition, a desire, that he was certain he no longer possessed. Would he ever contain that hunger, that wholeness, again?
—
Late that night, he played a series of nothings on an erhu that Kai gave him. Songs broke off and became other songs, Shajiabang sliding into “Night Bell from the Old Temple,” breaking into a fragment of Bach’s Partita No. 6 as if music blew through his mind like scattered pages. He kept on this way, playing the beginning of one piece and the end of another, and Kai lay back and gazed at the nearness of the ceiling. Kai had the key to this room where the Philharmonic’s instruments and record players were stored, but they could have been in Room 103, in Shanghai, in the remote Northwest or the far South, anywhere with four walls and only the two of them. Sparrow let himself believe they had found their way back to an earlier time. Kai asked him to play “Moon Reflected on Second Spring,” and Sparrow played it once, and once again, realizing that he could not recall the last time he had heard it. Perhaps on the radio in 1964. After that, it had simply disappeared. He felt a humming in his hands and a renewed, almost unbearable, pleasure. By the time professors from the Central Conservatory had discovered the composer of “Moon Reflected,” the blind erhu player, Ah Bing, was in his seventies. “If only you had come ten years earlier,” Ah Bing had famously said, “I could have played better.” The professors captured six songs on a recorder before they ran out of wire. When the songs reached the capital, Ah Bing was acclaimed as one of the nation’s master composers. He died only a few months later, and those six recorded songs became all that survived of his work. “Moon Reflected on Second Spring” was an elegy, a spiral of both radiance and sorrow.
Kai had other records. Overcome with curiosity, Sparrow set the erhu aside. Going through the collection, he felt like a child standing before a wall of colours. He chose Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Kai pushed blankets under the door to dampen the sound and opened another bottle of baijiu. They lay side by side on the thin mat, the tops of their heads grazing the record player.
“Shostakovich was criticized for the fourth movement,” Kai said. “Do you remember? The Union of Composers said it was inauthentic joy.”
“But inauthentic joy is also an emotion, experienced by us all.”