The seventh edition of the Little Dictionary of Children's Tongue came down on a Thursday, the translation-class instructor having everyone bring the old edition in, old and new handed out against each other for a one-month transition, and Zhou Shu carried both volumes home together, the old one's green cover furred at the edges, the new one in a blue-gray cover, thinner by almost a finger's width.
After supper Lin Wanzhao laid the two volumes side by side on the table and counted the copyright page first, then the entries. Old edition, two hundred entries; new edition, one hundred fifty. She turned from number fifty on: in the old edition, past fifty came five blank pages; in the new edition, past fifty came words directly, the blank pages gone, numbers and pages both gone.
She took Zhou Shu's translation-class homework to check against. Old one hundred and one was, in the new edition, fifty-one. Old one hundred and fifty was, in the new edition, one hundred. She checked five entries; all five were off by fifty. She turned to the last entry: the last entry was still listen, its number changed from two hundred to one hundred fifty.
She wrote in the soft notebook: the new edition = the old minus fifty.
Friday morning she phoned Comrade Tong first.
He gave his work unit, then his name, then the document number. She hadn't seen the document yet, and he read the number out twice, the second time slower — for her to take down.
She said: fifty-one to one hundred — where did they go.
He said: no entry made.
She said: those fifty numbers used to hold five blank pages.
He said: they held plate space.
She said: and the numbers.
He said: renumbered.
She said: the two generations won't match. The children memorized the old numbers; the ledger logs the old numbers too.
On his end a sheet of paper turned over.
He said: the new matches against the new.
She said: and thirty years of the ledger.
He stopped. The stop lasted longer than the turning of paper.
He said: the ledger stays as it was.
She said: then how is this dictionary to be used from now on.
He said: use it as a dictionary.
She hung up. The document was a carbon copy; it reached the station that afternoon with a page of reply from the Translation Compilation Bureau clipped to it, the reply one page only, the principle printed as a single item: where an entry has gone three consecutive sessions without an attested rendering, no entry shall be made. Above the signature block ran a small line: three units countersigned. The division chief had her also file a written statement on the correspondence between the new entry list and the station's thirty-year translation-sheet sequence; she said the correspondence was minus fifty; he said then write minus fifty; she went and wrote two lines and turned them in.
Turning it in, Xiao Jiang came over with his enamel mug and weighed the two volumes, one in each hand.
He said: thinner.
She said: thinner by fifty words.
He said: thin's good. The kids can carry it.
He opened the new edition past fifty, turned a few pages, turned up no blank pages, then turned it through from the start again.
He said: where are the empty pages.
She said: no entries made now.
He said: and the numbers.
She said: renumbered.
He shut both volumes and set them back where they'd been, squared together. He picked up the mug, walked two steps, came back.
He said: then all the numbers we wrote down before — wasted?
She said: the ledger stays as it was.
He said: oh.
He went. The tea scale on the mug's rim a layer thicker.
That evening she got home; Zhou Shu was copying words under the lamp, copying the old numbers. She pushed the new edition over; Zhou Shu set a pencil dot on it with the point and pushed it back.
Zhou Shu said: the instructor says the numbers changed, but the front ones don't need re-learning.
Lin Wanzhao said: then which do you recite.
Zhou Shu said: I recite the ones I've got.
She went back to copying. At the head of the sheet she was copying stood the number, the old number, one hundred and one, with "new fifty-one" written beside it in brackets. The pencil point had gone bald; she rolled the pencil hunting a fresh corner and copied on.
That afternoon she went down to the archive room, second level underground. The camphor smell was the same as ever, and the keeper was behind the old monitor knitting the same as ever, the yarn gray, the stitches closer than last time.
What she wanted was the Eighth Session dictionary-committee file, thirty-four pages. She had turned past its card once two months before, right beside the card with the blue sealed stamp stamped crooked — that time she had been pulling something else.
Pulling a file meant filling a slip. The keeper pushed the slip over, pinned the knitting needle into the yarn, and freed a hand to open the register. The register's cover was worn shiny, a layer of tape once glued along the edge. The retrieval column for this file was blank; the entry above it stood seven or eight years back.
The keeper said: this file, nobody's moved it in years.
She said: it moves today.
The file came up, kraft-paper casing, stapled square. In the committee records she read the tail first: two appendix pages fastened at the end, one the lineage of the committee through the sessions, one a name list, the list's first line printed: Persons with Knowledge of the Dictionary Committee Through the Sessions (Living).
First name, Wei. First Session.
Second name, Lin Wanzhao. Seventh Session, child committee member.
Print, the letter-spacing even, set as square with the rows above and below. Her name sat in the middle of them, taking up its cell, no wider, no narrower.
She looked two seconds, then read the rows before and after again: above the first name there was nobody; the third name was a surname she didn't know, Fifth Session.
The keeper finished a row and turned the knitting.
She said: what is this list for.
The keeper said: for circulation. It's clipped to everything that goes out.
She said: what goes out.
The keeper said: today's, likely. The copy to your station has it too — look at the attachment when you go back.
She said: I didn't see any attachment.
The keeper said: then it got lost in the clipping.
She went back to the lineage page. In the column for the Seventh Session's committee-meeting minutes the file numbers were complete, and in the destination column two lines: the first, this bureau's archive room; the second, a sentence added after: February 1994, fire damage in the archive room; surviving volumes transferred to the retired-records depot.
February 1994. She ran it through in her head. That year she was eleven, a year to go before her twelfth birthday.
She asked the keeper: this fire of ninety-four — do you know it.
The keeper said: I know it. It burned the inner room.
She said: how much burned.
The keeper said: what the files say is, two shelves.
Having said it the keeper turned the knitting over and went on: a good deal was saved. The smoke was thick, and paper fears water — of the two you could only pick one.
She copied the file number into the soft notebook, and copied the two appendix pages as well. Copying the name list, her pen stopped on her own name, stopped for less than a second, and went on to the third name.
Back at the station she went up to the third floor. He Che was still revising his draft, red pen, small slips of paper, the slips cut a little bigger than a matchbox. The wheeled case stood in the corner, wheels out.
She laid the new entry list on his desk.
He read it through once without picking up the red pen. From the table leg he dragged over the second card box, lifted the lid, counted fewer than ten, and drew out the card numbered fifty-one, setting it beside the new entry list. The card was blank; the number printed in the right corner.
He said: they've taken the numbers back.
She said: you still have them here.
He said: the cards are mine.
He said: as long as the cards remain, the numbers remain.
He said: deleting a number is easy. Adding one is hard. I've said that before.
She glanced at the three printed drafts on his desk. The second volume lay open to the entry list, numbers running to two hundred, the fifty-one-to-one-hundred column standing vacant, the numbers still there.
She said: your draft wasn't changed.
He said: the draft is mine.
He said: they print theirs, I set mine.
He said: later, when things don't match, match against mine.
She said: now they've spared themselves even the difficulty of adding.
He slid the blank card back and shut the lid, and his hand rested on the lid a moment.
He said: empty and occupying, and gone, are not the same way of occupying.
He said: what occupies can be filled someday.
She said: filled by whom.
He didn't take it up. He pushed the new entry list back to her, to the table's edge, and squared the paper's edge with his forefinger — the pressure mark on the side of that forefinger still there, its color faded some.
She said: the reply says, three consecutive sessions without an attested rendering.
He said: they searched three corpora.
She said: how many have you searched.
He said: three.
He said: zero is zero.
He said: zero cases doesn't mean it isn't there.
Having said that he capped the red pen. Two tries before the cap caught.
The retired-records depot lay north of the rail line; she went Saturday morning, it opened at half past eight, and the one who opened it was the man with the pilled white gloves. Inside, two rows of iron shelving, the racks deep, cardboard boxes stacked at the far end; two men in padded coats were carrying new boxes in, the boxes' bottoms scraping the floor, sounding the whole way.
She handed over the retrieval slip. One column on the slip: purpose.
She wrote: personal.
The depot man looked at that once, said nothing, and pointed to the third slot at the far end. The two padded coats lifted a box down onto the bench; one of them said something, the other laughed once, and they went on carrying new boxes in. No heat in the warehouse, only a coal stove beside the bench, and on the stove lid sat a kettle of water, not boiling.
The box was heavy with damp, wrapped in kraft paper, the rope knot half dead; the depot man picked it open with a paper knife.
The surviving volume was thinner than she'd imagined. The table of contents was there, pages one through one hundred twenty-six; against the table of contents she counted the pages through, no number missing in the middle, contents and pages matching. Line forty-four was printed: child committee members' opinion (on file). The ink of that line sat darker than the lines above and below — dark enough to tell it came from another machine.
A transfer slip was pasted to the casing, the fire-damage date filled to the day: February fourteenth. She tried to think where she had been that day. She thought a while and couldn't. Of that February she could not bring back one thing; she remembered only that the snow was heavy that winter, and Dad saying the coal was damp, the fire wouldn't draw.
She turned to page forty-four.
The paper was wrong. First she rubbed it with a finger, couldn't tell; then she fanned forty-three, forty-four, forty-five out side by side to compare thickness, and page forty-four was thicker by a thread, whiter in color too. Against the window light, laid lines ran inside the paper; the other pages had none.
The writing was wrong too. The pages before and after were two hands, both fountain pen, dense with entries. The face of page forty-four was running script, written steady, the ink even — a grown-up's hand.
The opening sentence: Upon study, approved: the entries listed above shall be removed from this session's word list and filed separately.
After it came a dozen or so more characters. She copied from the top, one character at a time; done, she counted it through — twenty-seven characters — and wrote twenty-seven in the corner of her paper.
The depot man had stood behind her a while.
He said: want it weighed.
He said: there's a scale in back, retired from the post office. For letters.
The scale had a brass pan, the needle blocked by a grain of broken glass. She took page forty-four off and set it on, then swapped in forty-three, then forty-five. Page forty-four pressed the needle down a division and more.
The depot man looked once at the dial.
He said: this paper's thick. There's a name for a paper's thickness — grammage.
He gave two numbers: this page above eighty grams; the other pages, sixty.
She noted: forty-four, above eighty grams. The other pages, sixty.
She turned on through. Page ninety-one was the committee name-list page, a printed frame, names in hand. Five rows of adult committee members. Below, a separate cell began, small print in type: child committee members. In the cell, five names.
The second was her own name. Three characters, the second one crooked, the last stroke running past the cell. Under the name sat one character — "attended" — in another hand, a grown-up's.
She looked at that cell. From the door the depot man urged her on: half past eleven, he locks up.
She said: nearly done.
She copied that page too. Copying her own name, she followed it stroke by stroke, and the copy ran past the cell all the same.
Leaving, the depot man filled in the exit time, eleven twenty, and had her sign the retrieval column. She signed. The depot man said: next time, phone ahead. He wrapped the box back the way it had been and tied the rope knot in a slip hitch.
On the ride back she slipped the copies into the soft notebook. The bus crossed the rail crossing, jolted once, and she put out a hand and held the notebook down.
Home was afternoon. Zhou Shu sat at the desk doing homework, the two dictionaries still lying side by side, a pencil pressed crosswise between them. On the back of the homework sheet stood a column of numbers, old numbers on the left, new on the right, arrows drawn between; at the tenth pair the matching stopped.
Zhou Shu said: Mom. Fifty-one won't match.
Lin Wanzhao said: it won't match.
Zhou Shu said: fifty numbers, gone like that.
Lin Wanzhao said: the numbers moved up.
Zhou Shu said: then fifty-one isn't fifty-one anymore.
She said: mm.
Zhou Shu shifted the pencil a little between the two volumes, without moving it away.
Zhou Shu said: when they deleted them, did they ask the children.
Lin Wanzhao brought the translation-class homework over and turned to that page: a square, no number, action, uncompleted. She looked at the page.
She said: they asked.
Zhou Shu said: which session.
She said: the Seventh.
Zhou Shu said: what year was the Seventh.
Lin Wanzhao said: before you were born.
Zhou Shu went oh. She turned the homework sheet back over and wrote on. Two lines in she stopped.
Zhou Shu said: your copy is the blank one.
Lin Wanzhao said: my copy is the blank one.
Zhou Shu turned the old edition to the five blank pages, laid her palm on them, pressed once.
Zhou Shu said: have you ever seen them. These blanks.
She said: can't remember.
Zhou Shu looked at her a while.
Zhou Shu said: I've seen them once.
Lin Wanzhao didn't take it up. She squared the two volumes together, old below, new above, and pushed them to the corner of the desk.
Zhou Shu packed the pencil case and went to her room. Before shutting the door she said: no new edition tomorrow. The instructor said so.
That evening she sat alone at the desk. The kraft envelope lay open — the copies of the two appendix pages, the copy of the twenty-seven characters, the retrieval receipt; she squared them, stapled once, put them into the envelope. The map was still at the bottom, untouched. She tied the mouth shut and set it on the second shelf of the bookcase. With the envelope on it, that shelf was full.
The soft notebook lay open; she read the day's lines through once: the new edition = the old minus fifty. The name list, second name. Forty-four, above eighty grams.
She turned to a fresh page and wrote one line: Seventh Session, committee member, second name.
Below it she started one more line and wrote four characters: I don't remember.
That line she did not cross out.
She laid the pen on the desk, point inward. There was no sound from Zhou Shu's room; a thread of light showed under the door, and later went out. She sat a while; upstairs somewhere a household was draining water, one pipe running to its end, then stopping.