“I’m looking for the record,” he said.
“What record?”
In the evenings, before the lamps were lit, a person could mistake her for Zhuli. The same querying eyes. The same persistent observation. Leave me, he thought. One day, won’t Zhuli leave me? But the thought shamed him.
“Is it your hands? They’re giving you pain again, aren’t they? Come and sit on the sofa.”
Kai had a daughter, too.
How did a person know, he wondered, what was love and what was a facsimile of it? Did it matter? Was the thing that mattered most the action that one took–or failed to take–in the name of that feeling?
“Tell me what record it is, Ba.”
Those radios outside kept up their warnings. This is a planned conspiracy and chaos. Its essence is to negate the leadership of the Party and the socialist system once and for all.
Ai-ming was kneeling on the floor beside him.
His daughter chose a record. She chose Scarlatti’s Sonatas in D. Sparrow had a sickly desire to crawl into the machine. In 1977, he remembered hearing that, during the Democracy Wall protests, a man his age named Huang Xiang had pasted up a poem he had written during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the 1970s, as he wrote the poem, he had covered each page in plastic, wrapped it around a candle, then added another layer of wax around it. When the Cultural Revolution ended, he melted the candles and removed all 94 pages of his poem. Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the Book of Records, an imagined survival? How was it possible that people of his generation had taken part in such acts and yet these acts remained so desperately hidden? What happened if you melted a person down layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers, and nothing at the centre, only quiet?
Grief for Comrade Hu Yaobang is being used to confuse and poison people’s minds.
Yes, he thought. This is what grief does. It is a confusion, perhaps a poison, that breaks us apart until finally we become something new. Or had he been lying to himself? What if he had failed to create someone new?
“Father…”
She put a glass in his hand and he tasted baijiu. How sweet the alcohol was on his tongue, a few quick sips and it might numb his body, thereby releasing him, as in the old saying, “When wine sinks, words swim.”
“Ai-ming,” he said. “No matter what happens, you must write these examinations. You must do well.” University was the only way, he thought, to force open the door.
“Ba,” she said, “it’s not too late for you to go abroad. Don’t you still need to write your music?”
Why did everyone keep mentioning his music? Couldn’t they just let it go? He drank the liquid down, pretending he had not heard her properly. Before the watchful eyes of Ai-ming, he felt exposed. As if the weakness of the times had lodged inside him, slowly pulverizing all that was unique and his alone, because he had allowed it to do so.
To his great relief, Ai-ming stood up and left him.
He sat in front of the record player. The composer inside him had fallen silent because Sparrow had allowed him to do so.
All revolutionary intellectuals, now is the time to go into battle! Let us unite, holding high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought, unite around the Party’s Central Committee….But no, those words, that editorial, had come from a different era, a different movement. It was only a memory.
Hidden in the record sleeve of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, conducted by Leopold Stokowski with Glenn Gould as soloist, along with the letters from Kai, was a photo of the three of them together: Sparrow, Zhuli and Kai. His cousin was in the middle, fourteen years old, the only one who looked straight into the camera, the only one with nothing to hide. She had been learning Prokofiev, it had been around the time of Spring Festival, and he remembered how much she had fallen for that composer. “Sparrow, do you think it’s possible to love something too much?” She had grasped his hand, the way a child does. She had still been a child in that summer of 1966. “But each phrase is so full, if I tried to hear all its overtones and undertones, nothing would ever get played!” Yet she had learned to hear a great deal, he thought. She’d heard too many voices and given credit to them all. They had been taught, through the lessons of Chairman Mao and the ecstasy of revolution, that death could preserve a truth. But death preserved nothing, he thought. It removed the wholeness of those left behind, and the truth they once knew vanished, unrecorded, unreal, like sound dissipating. He had lived only half a life. Without intending to, he had silenced Zhuli. He remembered how much of himself he had poured into that Symphony No. 3. He could have left the papers in the trusses of the roof, he could have hidden them with the Book of Records. Why had he not done so? Why had he destroyed them with his own hands?
A line from Big Mother’s most recent letter from Cold Water Ditch came back to him: There is no way across the river but to feel for the stones.
YIHEN HAD TOLD AI-MING that students from every Beijing university would be demonstrating the following day, in defiance of the April 26th editorial. “I’m going,” Yiwen had said. She had been in the middle of braiding Ai-ming’s hair and unconsciously gave the braid an angry tug. “I don’t care what my parents say. We went to a funeral and the government called us criminals! Do they expect us to just shut our mouths? We’re not the same as they are….”
In her study, Ai-ming closed her eyes. She missed the companionship of Big Mother’s snoring hulk. In her memory, she was back in Cold Water Ditch, she was the same nosy child snooping into Big Mother’s book trunk. Here were the forty-two notebooks of the Book of Records, a girl’s blue dress, as well as a pamphlet with a yellow cover, and on the cover the words, “Gods and Emperors.”
The pages had fascinated her. Later, she understood it was a political tract and an answer to Deng Xiaoping’s celebrated Four Modernizations. “We want no more gods and emperors,” the writer had proclaimed. “No more saviours of any kind. We want to be masters of our own country. Democracy, freedom and happiness are the only goals of modernization. Without this fifth modernization, the other four are nothing more than a new-fangled lie.”
When she opened her eyes, she looked out and saw Yiwen’s mother sitting in the courtyard, washing clothes. The pink dress rose briefly from the water before it was pushed under again, reemerging tangled up in the arms of a shirt.
As soon as her parents left for work, Ai-ming shut her books. She went outside, walked calmly to the north gate of the alleyway and retrieved her bicycle. She hopped on. As she pedalled away from the books, she felt suddenly free, airborne. At the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she swerved across the intersection, dodged a cart loaded with water drums, and continued on under the big trees of Yuyuantan Park.
Sidestreet and delivery lanes opened up before her, and she flew north until she reached the Third Ring Road. Here, noise pummelled the buildings. At first all she could see were hundreds of green-hatted police. But behind them, just visible on the other side, were the edges of innumerable banners, mostly red and gold, like a wedding. The loudspeakers, out of sync, blurted out garbled warnings, “Demonstrations without official approval are illegal and will be banned! Demonstrations without official approval…”