The authorization came up the mountain with the two o'clock bus, a kraft-paper envelope, the sender line reading Window Period Administration, and in one corner of the envelope a small line of print she had never seen — the Preparatory Office of the Thirtieth-Year Full Translation Ceremony — an office that appeared in no document she had ever handled, but what was inside the envelope was real: a Deep-Translation Collection Authorization in triplicate, the back of the third copy printed with the priority clause; the clause was not long, two lines, and it said that on the day of the ceremony one live deep translation would be held, its results to enter the authoritative text per the Regulations (Trial); that the order of collection would be set by registration years and remaining window time; and that the guardian had the right to sign a waiver, on which the line moved up.
The name first in line she did not need to look up. Zhou Shu.
She turned the triplicate's last page over to the issuing box. Under the three characters of the preparatory office sat one signature, ballpoint, the last stroke rising, running out half a centimeter past its end. The last time she had seen a signature like that it was in a countersignature box; a month on, the signature had climbed from the countersignature box into the preparatory office. She squared the paper, crease against crease, and put it back in the envelope.
The gatekeeper's register held one line from the day before: white commercial vehicle; the purpose field empty; the visitor field empty; only the times — in at ten eleven, out at ten twenty. The notice had gone out only today. She tucked the authorization under her arm and started for the machine room, stopped halfway, went back to the register. Nine minutes. The people in the car had delivered nothing, collected nothing. The gatekeeper couldn't recall it either; the car had only turned around in the courtyard, he said, one man got out, stood a while downstairs, smoked half a cigarette, stubbed it, got back in, and left.
From the gatehouse she called the Translation Affairs Section. Comrade Tong's voice came through the sound of turning pages: the list was not set; the order would be announced in its time; and a waiver once signed was withdrawn — withdrawn, and not changed after. She asked who would move up. Comrade Tong said, the list is not set. Between the two sentences ran the turning of pages; then Xiao Jiang asked something at that end, and Comrade Tong moved the receiver away, and half the answer leaked over: the station's opinion — the station will issue it.
After hanging up she sat a while in the small conference room on the third floor. The whiteboard's loose hook was still loose. She ran the priority clause through her head twice: signed, and Zhou Shu came off the list; once off, the ceremony went on as scheduled, the deep translation went on being collected, and the child who moved up into the place she did not know. Unsigned, and Zhou Shu stood inside the broadcast lights, and what she said entered the text, entered the communiqué, entered the exchange catalogue. She thought both lines through; neither one thought its way to the end.
At the afternoon meeting Xiao Cai asked one question: would the station send anyone to the Full Translation Ceremony. The division chief said it would, two, to stand the platform; and besides that the station was to put out a written opinion — the ceremony was not the station's decision, and the station's opinion would state the station's own. Breaking up, Xiao Cai waited for her at the door and, voice low, asked whether the authorization had come mailed to her home. Halfway through asking he waved it off himself: I won't ask; you don't answer. She said it had not come to the house; it had come through the station, to be forwarded. Xiao Cai said oh, and neither of them said any more.
That night she took the Regulations (Trial) out again, nine pages with four annexes, and turned to the section on collection. Nowhere in the articles did the three characters "priority right" appear. The priority right grew in the authorization, and the authorization's line of basis read: pursuant to relevant regulations, formulated separately. The separately formulated one she had never seen; it was not in the annexes either. She folded a corner of this page, thought a moment, then smoothed every other folded corner flat, leaving only this one.
Wang Chaosheng arrived at the station gate the next day.
In the register he had written his business as collecting old equipment; the handwriting still ran outside the boxes, the last stroke of the character "collect" poking down into the next line. The gatekeeper phoned up: a scrap collector, asking for her by name, says he's an old friend of the family. The word came out of the gatekeeper's mouth slowly, the way you read a word you've just met.
She did not take him into the station. Below the mountain, past the tunnel mouth, beside the bus stop stood a noodle shop; three in the afternoon, and inside it only the man cooking noodles and one man sleeping. Wang Chaosheng sat in the farthest seat, army coat still on, at his feet a woven-plastic bag, bulging, square and squared-away.
Thirty years since she'd seen him. He was somewhat fatter; the fingers were still thick, and in the nail beds lay a dark color that would not wash out — the foundry's color, gone in and never coming out. Seeing her, he stood up first, moved the things on the table to either side, and cleared a space.
In the woven bag were dictionaries. As she sat down he had already pulled one out, spread it open, pushed it across. The seventh edition, the Little Dictionary of Children's Tongue, an old cover, the spine mended with kraft paper. He turned to page fifty-one and set his finger on the blank.
Just these five pages, he said. One book now stands in for ten of the old ones.
Deleted, and dearer, she said.
Deleted, and they exist, he said. Before the deletion, who took it for a thing?
The steam of the noodles came over from the back. She did not touch the dictionary. He did not press her; both hands cupped around his glass, the tea in it white, not yet steeped. He spoke a little of the old things first: the half table; the word-connecting at month's end; his mother on three shifts in the workshop; his going later into his uncle's foundry; the foundry later failing; and then he was out collecting old goods — tapes, machines, books, anything. Of the partnering year he remembered more than she did. He remembered that when she connected words her fingers pressed on the table's edge, one press to a word. She did not remember pressing. She said, I don't remember. He said, you pressed.
He walked the talk around to the documents of a while back first. Since the page-deletion order, he said, all the old paper had risen, every session's alike — numbered slips, stubs the width of bus tickets, sign-in strips from meetings; there were people who bought them by the bundle, and the buyers could tell the sessions apart; one sheet of the Sixth Session traded for half a sheet of the Seventh. As he said it he looked at her once, to see whether she was following. Your session's editorial-committee list, he said — the children's column, the second name's signature — that one is priced on its own now.
She said, that page is in the archives; it doesn't come out. They don't even let you copy it whole.
He said, copies are collected too.
She said, I haven't got it in hand.
He nodded, and did not press. That passage was thereby done with, like a piece of goods turned over, its bottom glanced at, set back down.
Then he named his price. Before naming it he set the glass down, laid both hands on the table, spread open, like setting things out.
A tape of yours from that year, he said. For your signature on that waiver. Shushu comes off the list — off, and off all the way down; from now on they don't collect her.
She looked at him. He did not look away.
I was seven that year, she said. My father's recorder couldn't record it; the recorder's square machine couldn't record it; Master Qiao said it with his own mouth — it can't be recorded. Where would a tape come from?
Handed down, he said. The Sixth Session one, the one who locked the broadcasting room, carried off an empty reel — everybody knows that. But what gets handed down is exactly this: every session left one real tape. Some people collect them; some people wait to collect them. Your session's — I've waited thirty years.
Played, it's empty.
Empty is empty, then, he said. I'll think of something else.
He said it with bottom under it. Saying it, his hands still lay open on the table; not one finger moved. What he trusted was not the tape but the line the telling ran on — out of whose mouth, through how many hands, into whose ears; with that line there, whether the tape was empty was the next hand's business.
She should have closed the talk off dead here. She did not. She asked what she should not have: will you verify the tape?
Verify. Dual decks, played one against the other, he said. But to tell the truth — verifying or not is another matter.
What the buyer's end wanted, he said, was not anything on the tape. What it wanted was this tape coming out of her hands. He called this its provenance. When he said those two characters, the man cooking noodles at the back lifted his pot lid once, and the white steam came up; he waited for the steam to go back down before he went on: the content doesn't matter.
She did not recognize that sentence. She only found it strange in the ear, strange as though someone else had written it for him.
At the very bottom of the woven bag, under everything, lay a sheaf of photocopied mimeograph sheets, the corners curling. He drew one out to show her: the first line, Seventh Session translators, blue characters. On it were the words she had connected, and the one Wang Chaosheng had jumped in with that year, the one never heard. He pointed at the most complete sentence — the very sentence later marked highest on the black market — and said half of it was his own making-up: that word he had never heard at all; he had jumped in to pad the count; no one expected it to connect, and still less did anyone expect it to be printed.
This sentence is the dearest one now, he said.
This sentence is yours, she said.
It's all mine, he said. Who's to remember?
He folded that sheet up, folded it large and easy, four-fold, and tucked it back under the woven bag's bottom; then he squared the dictionaries one by one, and having squared them squared the whole stack against the table edge, twice. While he did these things he did not look at her again. Done, he said, the child stopping is a good thing — haven't you two wanted Shushu stopped all along? That time in the mountains (here he paused; he knew more than she had supposed) — which of those times wasn't labor thrown away? He said the family that would move up had been taking goods from him for years; people who knew the rules; if anything came out, they would not bite. The tone he said all this in was the scrap-collector's tone — grade, price, provenance; one thing was one thing.
Three days, he said. Same place. You bring the tape; I'll have the receipt written.
He had in fact written the receipt, written it ahead and pressed it under the glass; the last stroke of the character "received" ran outside the box again. One cassette tape received. The date was blank — the agreement being that he would fill it in when the time came. Having written it he read it over once, and when he'd read it tapped his finger on the two empty boxes at the date: fill them here when the time comes — one character to a box; don't write extra. She did not ask why he feared her writing extra.
Before leaving he asked one thing: Old Wei is still around, right. She said, he is. He said oh, and his hand touched once at the woven bag's mouth, as if to say something that had to do with that cloth bundle, and in the end did not say it; picked up the bag and went. The army coat's hem swept a stool on the way, and the stool's legs scraped one sound out of the floor.
She had eaten few mouthfuls of the noodles. As she left, the man cooking noodles at the back was picking over the vegetables for the next pot, one stalk at a time, picked evenly. She thought of He Che's two boxes of cards — the box past fifty, fifty cards, every card with only a number. She thought of him pressing on the box lid, not opening it.
That night she called Zhou Yu. Zhou Yu was away on commissioning; he said he'd be back tomorrow; said don't sign the waiver yet; said failing that, before signing, let He Che read the clause through — procedurally, did they have the authority to weld shut the four characters "won't collect her from now on"? Anything outside black-on-white counted for nothing. She said mm. Just before hanging up Zhou Yu said, for the test tape don't use the station's — the equipment room logs whatever goes out. She said yes, and hung up. She had not said the words "test tape"; he had said them himself.
The sentence Zhou Yu had asked her to put to He Che — she dialed it once. Busy. After a while she dialed again; it went through; it rang to the end; nobody picked up. She left no message. The next day Zhou Yu was back; coming in he read the authorization first, read the column for the waiver: empty. He said mm, set the bag down, and went to heat the meal.
The third day she went to the equipment room and drew one out all the same. In the logbook she wrote the use down as playback calibration. The equipment room man asked nothing further, gave her a scrapped test tape, said it had been wiped twice already, not clean, make do with it. On the spot she loaded the tape, ran a stretch of it, stopped, rewound, ran another stretch. What came off was only the machine's own noise and one very even hiss. It was an empty tape. She took the tape back to the instrument room, wired it to the machine, wiped it a third time, then pressed the record key and sat there one hour.
The instrument room held little sound. The heating pipe knocked twice at four, and once more after; the wall she sat against was the one that sounded first. At the end she coughed once, and the key stopped. When the tape run came down, the pause in it was very light, lighter than she had imagined.
The label she wrote at home. Zhou Shu was in the inner room doing homework, the door open a slit. On the label the first line was the item name; she wrote cassette tape. The second line was the date; the pen stopped once on the paper, and the year she set down was the wrong one — she had written the registration year. She looked at that year a while and did not change it. The third line was for contents; she left it empty.
Zhou Shu came out to pour water, saw the three copies of the authorization on the table, and stopped and looked once.
What is this, Zhou Shu said.
The Full Translation Ceremony. A live deep translation, she said. In the order of priority, you stand first.
Zhou Shu poured the water and, carrying the cup, walked toward the inner room; at the door's slit she said: going would be all right too. And went in. The slit was the same slit.
She sat at the table and did not move. The desk lamp inside came on; the light came out of the slit in one strip and lay on the floor without moving. She thought that Zhou Shu's window had less than two months left, and tried to say that sentence whole in her head, and where the saying would have run whole, it stopped. This arithmetic she had heard other people do; doing it herself, she could not carry it to the end.
At night she packed the bag. The reel went into an iron box; the calibration-passed sticker that had been on the box's outside she peeled off, peeled it uncleanly, left one corner. The authorization she signed in all three copies — signed in the guardian-informed column, which was has been made known, not the waiver. The waiver column, in all three, stayed empty. She set the iron box into the bottom of the bag; in the bag was also that kraft envelope, and in the kraft envelope, the map. The two things separated by the one layer of cloth at the bag's bottom.
The desk calendar lay open at December 22. That square was empty, and the blank line beneath it was empty too. With a pencil she put one dot in the square, wrote nothing, and pushed the calendar under the phone. The last thing pressed under a phone had been another calendar, and in one square of that calendar one character had been written: nine.
The three days came due tomorrow. The tape was here, the receipt was here, the clause she had read three times.
False. She had it settled.