“The censors are always the first to recognize it, aren’t they?” Kai smiled and time ran backwards. Biscuit. The name came unexpectedly to Sparrow. He had known the young woman in the pale green skirt and flowered blouse. She had been a violinist. She had been the same age as Zhuli.
Kai was still speaking. “Later on, Shostakovich reused pieces of the fourth movement in his patriotic work, cantatas to Stalin and so on. Did you know? All those fragments of inauthentic joy. In 1948, when his music was banned, he publicly accepted the wisdom of the Party. But, each night, after the long meetings, he went home and composed. He was working on his Violin Concerto No. 1 and, for the first time, he hid his name inside the work.”
Sparrow knew but had not thought of it in years. The signature, D, E-flat, C and B, which in German notation read D, Es, C, H, curled like a dissonance, or a question, in Shostakovich’s music.
The Fifth was everything Sparrow remembered, tortured, contradictory, lurid, gleeful. The room ceased to exist, the record itself became superfluous, the symphony came from his own thoughts, as if it had always been there, circling endlessly.
Sip by sip, the wine loosened their reserve. Kai said that in Beijing, in 1968, the struggle sessions had started up all over again. Mass denunciations were moved into stadiums. He saw a student humiliated and tortured in front of thousands of Red Guards.
“For what crime?”
“He said the children of political criminals shouldn’t be persecuted. That class status shouldn’t pass down across generations.”
The children of class enemies. Like Zhuli. Like Ai-ming. “What was his punishment?”
Kai turned, surprised by the question. “He died.”
When Sparrow asked how, he said, simply, “They shot him.”
Kai wiped his hand over his mouth. “Ozawa has promised to bring a few of us to America. I have this hope…”
The last time they had been alone, Shanghai was on the verge of change. This small room seemed to Sparrow like a hidden space inside the Conservatory. When he left this room, perhaps the door would lead him back to the hallway of the fourth floor, where the walls were covered with posters. He would arrive in his office before it was too late, he would tell his cousin that all things, even courage, pass from this world. Everything passes. But he could not get there in time. When he entered the room, he saw her again, just as she was. Each year, as he grew older, as the Zhuli in his memory grew younger, as Da Shan and Flying Bear drifted further away, he knew he should let them go. But how could he explain it? The person inside him, the composer who once existed, would not allow it. And Sparrow, himself, could not erase the composer. The composer wanted to tell Kai that no one, not even Deng Xiaoping, and nothing, no reform or change or disavowal, could return those years to them.
“Sometimes I think of leaving. If you had the chance to go overseas, Sparrow, would you?”
He smiled, wanting to make light of himself. “Even taking the train to Shanghai during Spring Festival feels like crossing the ocean. I never thought I would grow accustomed to the South but, after all this time, I feel at home here.” When he heard the words spoken aloud, they felt true.
Kai gestured towards the ceiling as if it were Inner Mongolia. “All the educated youth are going out of their minds, trying to get back to the city. And in Shanghai, they’re rioting, there are no jobs. Sparrow, look at it from their perspective. It would be unimaginable to them that someone could turn down a position at the Conservatory.”
“I prefer to wire a circuit board than to compose a symphony.” Inside the factory, Sparrow’s hands had learned another language entirely. His body had altered. Chairman Mao had not been wrong, to change one’s thinking, one had only to change one’s conditions.
Kai lit a cigarette and gave it to him. They were the luxury Phoenix brand, which Sparrow had never even seen before. Kai lit another for himself, holding it out to one side. The ashes fell harmlessly onto the concrete floor. The ceiling disappeared behind smoke.
“I used to hear music in everything,” Sparrow said, but the sentence hung between them. He did not know how to finish it.
“Dear Sparrow…” As Kai exhaled, he changed position so that the crook of his left arm partially covered his face. “I’m sorry for everything, I’m truly sorry….we were all alone but Zhuli’s situation was the most desperate. We all betrayed ourselves in some way. Not you…but I responded in the only way that I knew how. All I wanted was to protect those years of effort, to protect what I loved. I know I was wrong.” The words seemed to come from a far corner of the room, detached from Kai. “We all made mistakes….but can’t you see that it’s finished now. More than a decade has passed….She always said your talent was the one that mattered and she was right. What happened to your Symphony No. 3? It was your masterpiece. It was so full of contradictions, so immense and alive. I haven’t heard it in ten years, but I could still play it….You must have finished it by now.”
“I can’t even remember how it began,” he said. He wanted to ask Kai if he had denounced Zhuli, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. And it was true that everyone had denounced another to save themselves, even Ba Lute, even his brothers. Kai’s answer wouldn’t bring her back. “You loved her, too, didn’t you?”
“Zhuli is gone,” he said quietly. “Many people are gone, can’t you see?”
“I don’t see.”
Kai turned onto his side and looked at him, a beseeching look. He crushed out his cigarette and unthinkingly lit another, unable to bear the silence.
“At Premier Zhou Enlai’s funeral,” he said, “I went to Tiananmen Square, I read the posters and the letters people had left behind. I memorized them. Let me tell you, world I do not believe I don’t believe the sky is blue I don’t believe that dreams are false I don’t believe that death has no revenge. Everyone read them and I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change? Around Tiananmen Square, there were so many mourners…hundreds of thousands of workers. Crying openly because for a day or two, they could grieve in public. The police came and gathered up all the funeral wreaths. People were outraged. They gathered in the Square shouting, ‘Give us back our flowers! Give them back!’ They shouted, ‘Long live Premier Zhou Enlai!’?”
Sparrow wanted to listen to Symphony No. 5 again, to the reflective and reflecting largo. Shostakovich was a composer who had finally written about scorn and degradation, who had used harmony against itself, and exposed all the scraping and dissonance inside. For years his public self had told the world that he was working on a symphony dedicated to Lenin, but no trace of that manuscript had yet been found. When he was denounced in 1936, and again in 1948, Shostakovich answered, “I will try again and again.” Did the composer inside Sparrow have the will to do this? But if he knew the will and the talent were gone, what good would it do to begin again?
“Sparrow, remember the classics we memorized? The words are still true. ‘We have no ties of kinship or even provenance, but I am bound to him by ties of sentiment and I share his sorrows and misfortunes.’ We’ve waited our whole lives and now the country is finally opening up. I’ve been thinking…there are ways to begin again. We could leave.”
The possibilities before Sparrow, which should have given him joy, instead broke his heart. He was no longer the same person.