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It
was 1976, and Zhuli would have been twenty-five years old.
was the first time since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that such a lie was even remotely credible.
That same September, the end of the beginning came.
Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the international proletariat, has died….”
She thought of her sister and Wen, of her lost boys and Ba Lute, the unwritten music, the desperate lives, the bitter untruths they had told themselves and passed on to their children.
How every day of Sparrow’s factory life was filled with humiliations.
And her son had no choice but to accept it all.
She wept with rage and helplessness at all the crimes for which the death of an old, treacherous man could never answer.
Ai-ming was six years old
“All through the Cultural Revolution, we were able to perform,” Kai said.
Not everything disappeared, it was only put aside.”
Last October, people in Beijing began to unearth the records they had hidden.
“When Ozawa came, he said our ability to interpret the music had fundamentally changed….” He extended his hands as if he were carrying two eggs. “As if an entire emotional range was lost to us, but we ourselves couldn’t hear it. Every musician in the orchestra knew they’d been cheated. But until that moment, we never had to face it so directly.”
“Maybe some people always knew,” Sparrow said. “Maybe they never stopped knowing what was counterfeit.”
He Luting will be reinstated as President. The old faculty will be invited back. Your father, too. And you. He Luting specifically asked me to visit you.”
Kai said, “These reforms will give us back what was taken. I honestly believe this. You must have faith, Sparrow.”
But…no one is responsible for what happened.” “That isn’t true.”
Her father laughed and the sound chilled her. “My symphonies…”
The piece of music with the slow, spare notes turned out to be Variation No. 25 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
He taught her the first foreign names she ever learned: the first, Bā Hè (Bach) and the second, Gù Ěr Dé (Glenn Gould).
Inside Sparrow, sounds accumulated.
One night he dreamed that he sat in a concert hall.
He watched, unable to move, as Zhuli walked onto the stage in a long blue dress. She searched the auditorium for him. Her hands were empty. He woke.
Upwards of a thousand people pressed into the hall, Party cadres (grey), office workers (white), assembly line workers (blue), filing beneath a cascading banner that read: Fully expose and condemn the treason committed by the Gang of Four!
Deng Xiaoping. It was extraordinary that Deng had come to power. He, too, had been brought down by the Cultural Revolution, his political career destroyed and his family targeted.
His eldest son had been tortured by Red Guards and, in 1966, fell, or was pushed, out of a third-storey window, the same as San Li. But father and son had outlasted the turmoil, the son now famous in his wheelchair.
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.
You must not let them see, he thought. If they see that you are devoted to it, they will
take it from you.
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).
“We dedicate this Concerto No. 5 to our resurrected comrade, He Luting, President of the Shanghai Conservatory,” he said.
It was the first piano Sparrow had seen since 1966.
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.
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 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.
Late that night, he played a series of nothings on an erhu that Kai gave him.
“If only you had come ten years earlier,” Ah Bing had famously said, “I could have played better.”
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.
“Shostakovich was criticized for the fourth movement,” Kai said. “Do you remember? The Union of Composers said it was inauthentic joy.”
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.
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.
“I used to hear music in everything,”
Sparrow said, but the sentence hung between them. He did not know how to finish it.
We all betrayed ourselves in some way. Not you…
know I was wrong.”
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.
The possibilities before Sparrow, which should have given him joy, instead broke his heart. He was no longer the same person.
Perhaps they had loved one another, but now Sparrow had his parents to care for. They relied on him, and his life was not his own, it belonged to his wife and to Ai-ming as well.
