“Tell me something,” Swirl said suddenly. “Just a few words to distract me from this place.”
Big Mother swallowed several times to alleviate the dryness in her throat. Outside, Wen was smoking; the thin walls might as well be cloth. She told her sister about Sparrow and his brothers, about the jianpu music that ran from page to page. Sparrow never stopped composing. He didn’t breathe, she thought, he only emitted music. “My boys are energetic and have more hidden thoughts than a cartload of books. A mother never knows her children as well as she imagines.”
“How true, how true,” her sister breathed.
Big Mother said she’d been back to an old teahouse where they used to sing, the Purple Mountain Teahouse. “They’ve changed the name,” she said. “It’s now the Red Mountain People’s Refreshment House.” Swirl giggled. “The rooms are closed and all they serve is tea and melon seeds. But, still, the usual crowd comes to chatter, drink a little or fill their canisters. There are even singers who perform the new repertoire, ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Song of the Guerrillas,’ and all that. It’s stirring, who can argue! Even I want to overthrow something when I hear it. But revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile. There’s no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows. Of course,” Big Mother continued hurriedly, “in the New China such sorrows as we knew are long gone.” She went on to describe a few of the patrons, including the ones who still came with their orioles and thrushes, and the storytellers and balladeers who now told the epic of Chairman Mao’s Long March, in fifty dogged episodes.
“Do you remember that book I told you about,” Swirl asked. “The thirty-one notebooks? The Book of Records.” Her voice barely reached Big Mother, even though they were curled together on the narrow kang.
“You burned it, I hope? Anything that inspires such devotion is surely banned.”
“Burn the Book of Records?” her sister asked. A flash in her voice. Indignation. “How could I?”
“To save yourself,” Big Mother said.
“To save myself, I couldn’t.”
The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home. Tucked into the pages were all the letters Wen the Dreamer had written to Swirl. When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen. Swirl described the coded names, how the ideograms used for Da-wei and May Fourth changed, and seemed to refer to compass points on a map. Big Mother felt a terrible chill. The love letters would be bad enough but what was in that book anyway? What if it turned out to be written by a Nationalist traitor? They would all be screwed to the eighteenth generation.
“I need to go back to the house,” Swirl said. “I have to get those notebooks back.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
The words were spoken harshly but Swirl didn’t seem to hear. “Wen’s grandfather was a copyist, too, did you know? There are books hidden in the ground that have been preserved for centuries, all the books that Old West brought from America.” She pulled the cover up to her chin so that only her eyes and the bridge of her nose were visible. “Everything on this earth has its lifespan and then, it must be natural, we have to make it disappear. As if the new didn’t come from the old. As if the old didn’t grow from the new.”
Big Mother hesitated and then she asked softly, “But what is this upheaval?”
“Haven’t you seen it? I thought the land reform campaign had reached everywhere. During the war…I’ll never forget the cruelties we saw. I understand why nothing can stay the same.”
“Of course, but…”
“Once everything is broken, they can build society once more.”
How many times had her sister spoken these words? “They,” Big Mother said. “The revolutionary committees? The Communist Party?”
“They say it’s the wheel of history. I’m not afraid. You know how it is, one hand can’t stop the flood from destroying the bank. Only…I worry about Zhuli. She’s been born into the wrong class, she’s the daughter of Wen the Dreamer. The daughter of a landlord. Nothing I do can change that. What if I can’t protect her?”
“Come with me to Shanghai. My no-good husband can arrange it.”
“It’s the wheel of history,” Swirl said. There were no tears in her voice, just the cut glass of pragmatism. “The Party says only the guilty try to escape punishment. If we run away, not even Ba Lute will be able to intervene. We can’t risk it. I have to protect Zhuli, but how?”
—
Much later, in the years after Swirl had been released from the desert labour camps, when Zhuli had already grown into a young woman, Big Mother pieced the story together.
The Party men had arrived in Bingpai on the day Wen and his uncles were dragging ice off the mountain lake. It was arduous work, but worthwhile because, once covered in straw, the ice, ever useful, would keep for many months.
The uncles used to have labourers but now preferred to do this kind of work themselves. The previous year, when land redistribution had reached Bingpai, the brothers had known better than to argue. There were far worse fates than having to give up a few acres of land. In the neighbouring county, a dozen people had been struggled against–a sort of large meeting where accusations were shouted, where the accused were beaten and sometimes tortured–and executed, but the dead had been, mostly, rich men infamous for their savagery. Last year, when delegates from the Bingpai peasants’ association arrived at their gate, the brothers had not resisted and had relinquished the title deeds for all seventeen acres of the family holdings, which would be redivided among the village. True, Er Ge’s wife had left him, but he still had the two grown children. And Ji Zi had talked of killing himself, but no one took him seriously. Meanwhile life continued: until land reform was finalized, the fields still had to be tilled and orchards tended. In fact, the harvest of sweet apples that year was the most bountiful in the brothers’ memory.
As the cart complained its way through the gate, Wen and his uncles were surprised to see two strangers, as well as the village head and the chairman of the peasants’ association, standing outside. Da Ge stepped out from behind the block of ice. He greeted the visitors and invited them inside to share a meal. The village head declined. It was all rather uncomfortable and Da Ge, who had always been impatient, said, “Well, if there’s nothing urgent, we’ll get back to work. The ice can’t wait.”
One of the strangers, who had yet to introduce himself, intervened. There was a meeting underway at the village school, he informed them, and the brothers were late.
The village head stepped forward. “These two teachers,” he said, indicating the strangers, “have come all the way from the county Party committee. Of course, as your family is so prominent in Bingpai, how could we start the meeting without you?”
In the courtyard, the silence seemed to echo off the bricks and ice. Where was everyone anyway? Neither Da Ge nor his brothers had eaten in almost six hours. Still, he led his siblings and Wen through the gate and fell in line behind the strangers and the village head.
—
At the primary school, Swirl had been bundled off to the side with her daughter, where they knelt with twenty-odd others on the cold ground. Among them were the wives of Wen’s uncles, who had been brought under guard and were now at centre stage. The crowd was already in the hundreds, yet more people kept arriving to take part in the meeting. Da Ge’s wife was repeatedly slapped and kicked until she cried out for mercy. The fierce, no-nonsense woman, already in her mid-fifties, was hysterical. She was pawing at the ground as if trying to find a coin in the ice.