a few hours after their arrest. Later Mrs. Hua learned that her boss, the old bachelor Shaokang, had been the one to help them out. They would forever remain grateful to him, Mrs. Hua said when she saw him again, and he replied in a stern voice that he did not have a job for her anymore. But how had he done it? she asked, still in disbelief of her luck; he must have some powerful connection in the government; was it a brother, or a relative, or a friend? Shaokang looked up at Mrs. Gu. Let it be forgotten, he said in a near-pleading tone, and she realized for the first time that there were well-guarded secrets in his bachelor's life that he had risked for their sake.
Nini ate, slept, and cried for four days in Bashi's house before she was discovered by the police. They had not come for her but to seek nonexistent evidence for a nonexistent crime, as Bashi was alleged by Kwen to have been an accomplice in his criminal actions against the body of the executed female counterrevolutionary. Both men's places were searched. Two glass jars of formaldehyde, in which a woman's severed breasts and private parts were on display, were uncovered by the police in Kwen's shack after they shot his growling guard dog in its forehead; in the other house they found a girl, along with her baby sister, intimidated into self-imprisonment by the criminal. The girl kept talking about a marriage arrangement that nobody believed to have existed and later, when she was escorted away from the house, she screamed and kicked her captors. A medical examination proved her to be mentally normal and still a virgin, and it mystified the police that she kept talking about her marriage to Bashi, her kidnapper. When questioned about why they had not reported the two missing daughters, her father said nothing but that he had forgotten the girls when he had to tend to two daughters who had been burned in a house fire as well as a wife who had miscarried. How could parents forget a daughter? a young policewoman asked her colleagues, and they replied that worse things had happened to other children, and she'd better toughen herself up for her line of work.
The tales, of the body parts from the executed woman, and the incarcerated girl discarded by her own parents who had begun to have feelings for her kidnapper, traveled from mouth to mouth, ear to ear; for the time being, they were the only topics safe to discuss in Muddy River, and people invented details, their imaginations drowning their fears of a life they did not understand.
Under the policy of giving the harshest punishment to all anti-government organizations and individuals, three hundred and eleven people who had signed the petition were tried as counterrevolutionaries, their sentences ranging from three years for the followers to lifelong imprisonment for the leaders. Upon reviewing the cases, the provincial officials pointed out that a warning to the masses would not be effective without a death sentence.
SHE HAD NOT EXPECTED the quietness. The sounds that had once made up the natural course of her day—Ming-Ming's crying in the middle of the night, Han's joking, her mother's complaining, the patriotic music she played for the town, her own voice, reading the news to the same uninterested ears—did not leave her; rather, they blocked out the everyday noises for Kai: water dripping, the crying and whispering of women in nearby cells, the unlocking of the window where meals were delivered, her own footsteps measuring the cube of her cell.
It was not a surprise that, after the first day of her confinement in the best guesthouse in Muddy River, Kai had been transferred, wrists cuffed, to her present cell. She did not know what to expect in the hours and days to come, yet in a strange way she was looking forward to it, as someone floating above unknown territory looks forward to landing on solid ground.
And now the phantom limbs of the once-familiar sounds pulled her down, and in the quietest nights she thought about Ming-Ming, for whom she would be slowly reduced, by his father and his grandparents, into a nonexistence. Of all the people she missed—her mother and her siblings, Jialin, and even Han—Ming-Ming was the one who would not have any memory of her once this page was turned. Had Autumn Jade wished, in her fearless waiting for death, that there could be a parallel world in which she could continue mothering her children?
Kai began to sing to take her mind off the pain. She sang the songs that had long ago been stored away with her youthful dreams. Her voice sounded different than what she remembered from years ago, but the open stage had not taken a grip on her then as the cold walls did now.
She sang the songs that Gu Shan must have been singing in her long years of imprisonment.
Many years later, in his memoir, one of the imprisoned activists would write about listening to her singing. He had been released and depurged, and she had, by then, long ago been claimed by legends.
***
THE MAY DAY CELEBRATION was marked by the public denunciation of Wu Kai and her accomplices in the antigovernment uprising. On the morning of the denunciation, Tong got up early and washed his face, wiping the backs of his ears with extra care. His mother had sewn a pair of blue pants and a white shirt for him the previous two nights, and after he dressed, she ran a hand across his clothes to get rid of the tiniest wrinkle. Tong was going to be one of the speakers at the denunciation meeting, along with Han and a few other model citizens of Muddy River who would be granted the title of Guardian Hero of Communist China. A special ceremony was to take place, before the denunciation meeting, for Tong to become a Communist Young Pioneer. He looked at his shirt, which would soon be decorated with the red scarf; when he looked up, his mother was gazing at him with awe and a sadness he did not understand. Be a very good boy, she said, and told him that she and his father were both very proud of him; Tong glanced at his father in bed—he had not recovered enough to recognize Tong's face—and said that he would win all the prizes and make them the happiest and proudest parents in the world.
Two women officers unlocked the cell door and came in, neither meeting Kai's eyes. A package from your mother, one officer said, and handed a bundle of clothes to Kai. Since her arrest, Kai had refused to see her mother, who had come several times to visit. What a hard-hearted woman she was, the judge had said to her at the first trial, which had been carried out in secrecy with only a few officials from the courthouse present; she had betrayed not only the party that had nurtured her but also her own mother, her husband, and her son. Kai remained quiet and aloof, and she was not surprised by the retrial, carried out in a similar manner. What was there to fear about death? she asked when the sentence was read to her; she imagined the same message being read to Jialin, knowing he was as ready as she was.
Kai unrolled the bundle, new clothes and shoes her mother must have wrapped up for her. It was her mother's misfortune to have a daughter like her, Kai thought, and she forced herself to focus on the small task of changing her clothes. She was not a daughter, or a wife or mother; she was herself, and she would remain herself for the rest of the day.
At half past nine she was escorted to a covered police van, her arms heavily bound behind her and already growing numb. The officers, two men and two women, were silent; the leader of the four, about ten years older than the rest of them, was almost courteous when he told her that she was not to make any counterrevolutionary speeches at the denunciation ceremony.
Why didn't they cut her vocal cords to ensure her obedience, as they had done to Gu Shan? Kai asked, almost out of curiosity. The three younger officers seemed unaware of what she was talking about, their faces remaining
