“But what if there’s trouble?” Ba Lute said. “Does she think they’re immune?”
Sparrow looked up. Who are they, he wondered.
Wanting to sound like the son of a Communist hero, Sparrow said, “We could go and rescue her.”
His father didn’t answer.
The music continued.
Sparrow walked out into the moonscape of the fifteenth variation, side by side with his father and yet separated from him. Glenn Gould played on, knowing that the music was written and the paths were ordained, but sounding each note and measure as if no one had ever heard it before. It was so distinguished and yet so real, that he sighed audibly thinking that, even if he composed music for a hundred thousand years, he would never attain such grace.
“There’s no future in music,” Ba Lute said. His voice held no reproach. He could have been saying that this room was square and the motherland had twenty-two provinces, one autonomous region, and a population of 528 million. Sparrow listened as if his father were speaking to some other individual, to the portraits of Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai and Vice-Premier Liu Shaoqi, for instance, that gazed at them intelligently from the wall. His father’s face seemed to fall in line with the portraits. “When you were a child, fine, it was okay to be a dreamer. But you’re a bit wiser now, aren’t you? Isn’t it time to start reading the papers and building your future? In a new world, one must learn new ways. You should be studying Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought with greater fervour! You should be applying yourself to revolutionary culture. Chairman Mao says, ‘If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.’?”
The sixteenth variation came upon them majestically, a stately entrance garnished with trills. As the notes quickened, they seemed to carry Sparrow with them. He saw an immense square filled with sunshine.
“When you practically live in the Conservatory,” his father was saying, “when you shut the door to that practice room, do you think no one hears you? Do you believe, truly, that no one notices that you have played Bach for seventy-nine consecutive days, and before that Busoni for thirty-one days! You refuse to trouble yourself with the erhu, pipa or sanxian. And I have done so much for the land reform campaign! I have been a model father, no one can say otherwise…” Ba Lute drank morosely and fell silent. “Why do you love this Bach and this Busoni? What does it have to do with you?”
His father stood up, circled the room until he came face to face with the portrait of Premier Zhou Enlai. “Of course Bach had his faith, too,” Ba Lute conceded. “The poor son of a rabbit had more duties than our own Party Secretary: every week another mass, fugue, cantata, as if Bach was a factory not a human being. But look at my life, Sparrow.” From the portrait, Premier Zhou seemed to nod in sympathy. “Every week, fifty performances in schools, factories, villages, meetings! I’m a machine for the Party and I’ll perform on my deathbed if necessary. Old Bach understood that music serves a greater purpose, but don’t I know this, too? Doesn’t Chairman Mao?…In your heart, Sparrow, you think the foreigner is a brighter comrade than your own father.” Ba Lute let out a heavy sigh. “What is it that he promises you? At some point, you must stop stealing Bach’s chickens and get your own, isn’t it so?”
Outside the world was dark and the young wutong tree in the courtyard seemed to hold the weight of the winter night upon its thin crown. Sparrow wished that he could turn the hands of the clock forward, wind it another year, and then another, to when his symphonies would be played in the Conservatory’s auditorium. He imagined an immense orchestra of Mahlerian proportions, large enough to make the music inside him rattle the ceilings, vibrate the floor and realign the walls.
“My son has heard nothing,” Ba Lute said. “He is deaf.”
“I’m listening, Ba.”
“To me,” his father said, staring at the album cover. “I want you to listen to me.” But he spoke as if his words were directed to Glenn Gould or to Bach himself. “Be practical, my son. Think of the future. Try to understand. There are many degrees and many roads of happiness.”
—
When Big Mother Knife returned to the mud hut, Swirl and the little devil lay exactly as she had left them, joined together on the kang in exhausted sleep. Wen was cocooned in a blanket on the floor. Her sister’s face in the moonlight was pale and lined, and Zhuli seemed to pull on her as children do, resilient and single-minded in her needs. Sitting in the corner, using her coat as a blanket, Big Mother watched moonlight creep beneath the door. It entered the room so piercingly that, when she looked down at her own fingers, she hardly recognized herself. She thought she saw the hands of Swirl. She thought her shoes were the very shoes of Wen the Dreamer, her knees were Ba Lute’s, her arms belonged to Da Shan, her stomach to Flying Bear, her heart to Sparrow. She had a terrible premonition that, one by one, they would be broken off and taken away from her. Or was it she who would be the first to leave?
Big Mother’s escapade with the God of Literature seemed ages ago and miles away.
The previous day, Big Mother had gone to town and purchased the plainest of practical items, heavy blankets, a thermos, padded coats, as well as rice, barley, cooking oil, salt and cigarettes. In a few months’ time, Big Mother told herself, she would get permission to come and see her sister again. By then the spring planting would have begun, and she could assess their needs once more. Swirl had told her that the Party Secretary had promised her a position teaching in the primary school. Perhaps conditions were not so dire. But even as she considered this, a thick sadness filled her. She looked up and saw that Zhuli had woken and was winking at her, one small hand covering her right eye.
“Good morning, little devil,” Big Mother said.
The girl switched hands and covered her left eye.
Big Mother sucked her teeth. “Impudent monkey!”
“Father used to call me that,” Swirl said. “I remember now.” Her sister’s hair tumbled over her shoulders as she sat up. “Why don’t you come up here where it’s warm?”
Big Mother slowly climbed to her feet. Everything ached. Her body was growing old and useless, the result, surely, of endless political meetings and study sessions. The Party propaganda was muffling her thoughts, wrapping her in a thick dough of imbecility.
“What is it?” Swirl asked. “Why are you crying?”
“For joy,” Big Mother lied.
Her sister laughed. The girl tittered, too.
Winking at the girl, Big Mother picked up the cardboard box and set it on the kang beside her sister.
Swirl looked intently at it, as if the box reminded her of a person she had not seen in many years. Her fingers reached out, pulled the loop and the string curled down. Swirl lifted the lid and slid it aside. She stared down at the thirty-one notebooks, the only chapters Wen had been able to find, of the Book of Records.
“But–” She touched the corner of the box. “I know it isn’t possible.”
“Let us just say, the God of Literature summoned it home.”
—
The following morning, in the bus on the way back to Shanghai, fate placed Big Mother beside a hardy young woman whose husband was deputy village head. “Far from home, hmm?” the young woman said, unfolding a red handkerchief, spreading it over her knees like a tablecloth, and depositing a great quantity of sunflower seeds on top of it.