On the afternoon of the three-day deadline, the noodle shop held one thing more than it had last time: Wang Chaosheng had set a dual-cassette recorder on the table, iron handle wound with yellow tape, two cassette bays of which one had its door and one stood open, and he slotted the tape into the one with the door. The shop was still the three-in-the-afternoon shop, the noodle-boiling going on in the back, the man who slept there traded off for one wiping tables, and when the wiper reached their table and saw the machine laid out on it, he went around.
She set the tin box on the table and pushed it toward him. The one torn corner of the certificate of conformity still stood up on it.
Wang Chaosheng didn't go at the tape first. He drew the receipt out from under his cup, flattened it, weighted it at the table's edge, and only then opened the box, loaded the tape, pressed the key. The machine gave one click, the tape-run sound came up, one very level layer of hiss. He listened without headphones, just sat there listening, both hands cupped around his water glass. The tape counter carried three digits; the units digit was missing a segment, so an eight and a zero couldn't be told apart.
The hiss ran a small fraction of the side. When the two knocks on the heating pipe came through, he didn't move. At the cough at the end he pressed the rewind key, ran it back, and played it once more. The cough passed; he stopped the machine.
He said, that cough. Yours.
She didn't answer.
He said, six years I was partnered with you. That's how you cough with a cold.
He ejected the tape and put it back in the tin, moving like a man putting away a piece of porcelain — first checking whether the mouth of the box sat true. On the receipt's two blank boxes for the date he took out his pen and filled them, one box at a time; when they were filled he capped the pen, and on the fingers capping it the foundry's dark stain was still there. He pushed the receipt across. One cassette tape received. Four words and a date, not one word more.
He asked, the waiver.
She said, can't be signed. By procedure, the waiver has to be signed at the collection site on the day of the ceremony itself. Signed early, it doesn't count.
Half of that was true. The other half she had put together herself, just now, at the mouth of the tunnel.
Wang Chaosheng looked at her a while. All his years in old goods — condition, price, provenance, one item one item — his ear could tell there was something cut into what she'd said. He packed the tin into the woven sack, pressed it under the dictionary, and cinched the cord twice around.
The tape I'll take now, he said. The characters — that waits for ceremony day. If you've signed them by then, you and I are square. If not — he paused — if not, there's no giving it back on my end either. Once a tape has passed hands, there's no such thing as handing it back.
She said, I know.
He stood; the second button of his padded army coat had come loose and was lashed around with a length of white thread. He picked up the sack, and at the door he turned back, and what he said was not about the tape: next week the television will have your Shushu. Every station in the world is carrying it. He made a handing motion toward the door. Those buyers of mine — not one of them will step out of the house that day.
He left. The table-wiper came over and went over their table twice, the first pass for the table, the second pass only for the stretch where the machine had sat.
That evening she put the receipt and the authorizations into the same drawer, the receipt pressed underneath the authorizations. The waiver line, on all three, still stood empty. Characters are a good thing, she thought — one character trades for one tape, one character to a box, and nobody writes one more. There she stopped. The thought wasn't hers; it was like something heard from someone.
Zhou Shu's translation-class records arrived the day after, kraft envelope, routed through the station. She had never read them closely before; this time she read the file from the front. In the records from early December, Zhou Shu's relays were still short: it says, bright. It said it four times. The lower layer moved first. Past midmonth the sentences began to run long, and the way they ran long was wrong — not more said, but everything said past the short ones was boilerplate. The entry for December 14 read: it said one word, the sense luminous, magnitude four, direction upward, process continuing. Below the line for the relayer's signature, the staff compiler had copied it out as it stood.
She pulled He Che's printed draft off the shelf and turned to the word-class section. Luminous, magnitudes one through seven; among the direction words, up ranked second. She set the entry against it: sense, magnitude, direction, process — four items, not one off, the order itself the same.
The rule that relays grow shorter each time was set by the Bureau; she had kept it thirty years. Now the relays were growing longer each time. She paged back toward the front and read the December 14 entry once more. Not one character in it was wrong. She took a pencil and drew a light line under that row, the line not reaching its end, and stopped there.
Zhou Shu came home in the evening and did homework, the door open a crack. When the homework was done she came out for water, and Lin Wanzhao asked what had been said today. Zhou Shu stood holding the cup and thought — that thinking had never been there before; before, the words came out together with the water — and then said, it said one word, the sense luminous, magnitude four, direction upward, process continuing.
She said, when you hear it yourself — what is it like.
It's like this, Zhou Shu said. She finished the water and added one more line, said this way, they remember it fast.
She didn't ask who they were. Zhou Shu carried the cup back to the inner room, and passing the table's edge her fingers went over it flat — the whole hand skimming level across the edge, no pressing. She stared at that hand a while. Thirty years before, someone had told her that when she linked the words her fingers pressed on the table's edge, one press to a word. That had been Wang Chaosheng telling her; she herself didn't remember it. Now she watched this other hand, the hand that didn't press, and saw all at once that this family had lost the same thing, thirty years apart, lost in the same place.
The desk lamp sent one strip of light out through the door's crack. She closed the grammar, smoothed flat with her nail the label He Che had stuck along its spine, gone loose at one edge.
He Che came on the third day, no warning — he phoned up from the gatehouse at the entrance to say he had three pages he wanted to hand her in person. She took him into the small third-floor conference room. The whiteboard's loose hook was still loose; the projector still went unlit. Coming in, he noticed the whiteboard first, reached out and squared it, and when the hook was still loose after that, he let it be.
The wheeled case came in with him, one wheel loud. He laid the three pages on the long table and pushed them across. Proposal on the Suspension of Comrade Zhou Shu's Deep-Rendering Collection Qualification. The line for the proposing party carried He Che's own name; the date was December 21.
The twenty-first. The day she had dialed him and let it ring itself out with no answer was the twenty-second. She set the two against each other and said nothing.
A proposal initiated from the collection side — that runs in procedure, he said. Relay quality falls off, the flattening stage sets in; collect past that, and every sentence that enters the text has to carry a question mark. A library thirty years in the building — let one flattened sentence in, and the trouble runs on behind it.
He said it very even, like reading aloud. And she did in fact see those three pages saying exactly this — clause one, clause two, grounds, notes, and in the notes a citation of the seventh article of the Regulations (Provisional). Nothing in it to fault.
She asked, does she know it herself.
Knowing whether it's flattening — that won't be her, He Che said. When it flattens, what a person holds is the standardized copy; what's in the hand and what's in the mouth are one copy. Right now she thinks she speaks better than before.
There he stopped. Across the conference room's radiator lay a rag, dried, ringed with the marks of wetting and drying. He glanced at the rag and drew his hand back from the three pages.
She said, the phone call, last time.
I was writing this, he said. On the second clause I stuck three days. The second clause has to say whether her relays can still be used; if they can, suspension is out of the question; if not — He didn't finish. He lifted the paper cup; the paper cup was empty; he set it back down.
From the wheeled case he took the two card boxes and set them on the table, the box for one to fifty, the box for fifty-one to one hundred. He opened the first, turned to one divider, drew out a card, and pushed it across. On the card, in his hand, a copied sentence: Teacher, what you read is a score. What we listen to is the instrument. Under it ran a ruled line, and under the line a date: November 29.
This one can't be verified, he said. By the rules, what can't be verified doesn't enter the system. Six years, I was the one writing the rules.
He took the card back and slid it into the divider it had come from, no hurry in his hands. Then he squared the three pages, and squared, did not push them to her again — he laid both hands on them.
Don't rush to sign anything, he said. The proposal goes in Monday. Approved or not — you know only once the procedure has run its length. If it's approved, it stops whether you sign or not; if it isn't — He stopped again. This time she waited a while; he didn't pick the sentence up; he turned it aside himself: if it isn't, then we'll see.
When he left, the case's wheel sounded the whole length of the corridor, on to the stairwell, round the corner, gone. She went back to the long table; he had left the three pages. She read the second clause. The marks of the three stuck days were still on it: the paper in that passage rougher than elsewhere, gone over with an eraser, the erased places rewritten, the characters one size smaller than elsewhere.
The proposal never ran its procedure through. Friday afternoon the district bureau phoned and asked her to come in, third floor; the document, they said, was a matter to discuss face to face.
It was her first time in that third-floor office. A rag lay across the radiator, much like the one at the station. On the desk sat a sheet of glass, and under the glass a piece of paper was pressed — not a document but a school composition, marked in red, the comment taking half a page; the signature line carried no name, only a date, and the date was thirty-odd years old. A former language teacher. In her head she filled in that column on her list of names.
Gu Ling was older than she had pictured, hair half white — not the white of age, the white of a man who hadn't got around to it. He poured her tea; the cup carried the Bureau's printed characters. First he pushed a document across: He Che's three-page proposal, with one more stamp on it at the top right — Not Accepted for Processing, and in the grounds column one line: procedure nonconforming; qualification matters may not be initiated from the collection side.
The procedure was correct, Gu Ling said. That one, He Che — on procedure he has never once been wrong. Which is why the stamp could only land on the procedure.
She looked at the stamp. The red paste had gone on very even.
The report was me that sat on it, Gu Ling said. Before sitting on it I called him — forty minutes. What he's asking for, I can't approve. Next Wednesday is the Thirty-Year Full Translation Ceremony, broadcast live to the whole world; the venue, the signal, the text library were set up as a project three years ago. The children on the list, one hundred and four, their order locked into the system a month ago. A qualification matter, ten days out from a ceremony — no session has ever stopped one.
She said, he cited the seventh article.
The seventh article governs collection quality, not qualification, Gu Ling said. If he weren't He Che, that stamp would have gone down without so much as a phone call.
He said all this at no great pace: one sentence finished, a pause, as though waiting for someone to take it up; nothing coming, he went on to the next. She thought of someone else who spoke in these pauses — across thirty years what came to her was Wei Dongquan, and then didn't seem like him: Wei Dongquan's pauses were spent waiting on the other side; this man was simply in the habit of waiting for someone to take it up.
Zhou Shu's relays can't be used anymore, she said. The flattened ones go in — into the text too?
Flat or not — what I say doesn't count, and what He Che says doesn't either, Gu Ling said. There's the Verification Section.
She said, the Verification Section verifies what.
It verifies format, he said, and once those three characters were out he stopped a beat on his own account, took a drink from the tea; the cup, set back, turned half a circle on the glass. Eleven years I've sat in this seat. I know format doesn't catch flattening. I knew it back when I was marking language papers — the batch with the most even handwriting isn't necessarily writing its own words. But the system trusts evenness. Thirty years now, the one thing the whole world agrees on is that children's words are not even. Thirty years ago the children said our words out for us — uneven, not smooth, with spit on them — but those were the original words. Next Wednesday, a hundred-odd stations the world over are waiting for one sentence of original words. I sit on one proposal, and buy this system's thirty years of credit not collapsing onto one line of flattened characters — you do that sum for me; tell me how it comes out.
She didn't do his sum. She asked the question she'd had since walking in, that day — the Watching Day — who sent the car.
The car had come to the foot of the building on registration day, three days ahead of the notice; she had carried the matter the better part of a year — it was in no file, and on the registration book the column for reason stood empty.
Gu Ling didn't answer at once. He looked down at the glass, as if hunting a turn of phrase in that composition's red comment.
I sent it, he said. The car doesn't go through stamps; the notice does. Children of translation-officer households — a column of their own on the registration roll, a column of its own from the First Session on. The year you registered, you were already in that column. Thirty years: forty-one children in it, in it from the day they were born. Shushu stands thirty-ninth.
She said, waiting for what.
For the window, he said. Not for her to come to harm — for her to open her mouth. This thing of original words, past twelve it's gone, gone session by session. We grown-ups, our grammars get compiled thicker and thicker — I keep He Che's three volumes on my own desk — and yet in thirty years, every whole sentence said to the other side has come from a child. I don't watch your family; I watch that column. In that column, the one from her mother's session was the only one ever to say the fiftieth word whole.
She sat without moving. The composition under the glass lay close to her hand; the first two characters of the red comment were the ones meaning missed by. The two behind them lay under the glass's glare, past reading.
The waiver — you've signed none of the three, Gu Ling said. I know. If you want to sign, there'll be oversight on site; sign, and the order is filled by substitution that same day. If you don't — He drew the three pages back from in front of her and slid them into a stack of papers fastened with paper clips on his desk; the stack was thick, sorted by session, and the sheets at the very bottom had gone yellow — if not, then let the child rest until that day. These next few days, the classes can stop as well. He Che's proposal isn't accepted, but the grounds in it I'll pass to the Verification Section. Passed on is passed on. Don't count on it.
When she rose to go, Gu Ling walked her to the door, and at the door added one line, not loud: the one thirty years ago — I watched that on television too. That year I was still teaching. He paused, waited for her to take it up; she didn't; he pulled the door open.
The bus home went through the tunnel, four kilometers, the lamps inside it spaced one bay to a bay. Leaning on the window she walked the day through from the front: one tape passed through one pair of hands, one cough examined and found legitimate; one proposal pressed under paper clips, and under it the yellowed paper of seven sessions; one column of its own, forty-one children — where she herself had stood she never asked; Zhou Shu stood thirty-ninth. That number she took down, with nowhere to take it down, and laid it in her mind.
At home Zhou Shu was in the inner room, door open a crack. Before going in, Lin Wanzhao stood a moment at the crack. Zhou Shu wasn't doing homework; she was listening. Headphones on, cord hanging down, the far end plugged into nothing. Catching someone at the door, Zhou Shu lifted one earpiece off; the other stayed seated.
Next Wednesday, Zhou Shu said. I know. The teacher covered it. We go on camera; we're to wash our school uniforms.
Teacher He has stopped your classes, she said. You needn't go, these few days.
Zhou Shu took the other earpiece off too, set it on the desk, squared it. Thought a moment, and said, then I'll listen at home.
She said, listen to what.
Zhou Shu pointed at the headphones and said, what it says now — eyes shut, I know what it's going to say. It says bright, and I know the next one is bright again. A stop, and then: same as reciting a lesson.
She couldn't carry that talk any further. She said wash your hands and eat.
While she cooked she heard sounds from the inner room and went to look: Zhou Shu had the to-verify notebook spread open on the desk, and in today's squares there was writing. All month those squares had held the same few characters, very even, one to a square. Today's read: bright, bright, bright. Three squares, three characters, the hand the same size, the spacing the same. The two months before had not been like this; the two months before, the characters had come big and small, some pressing on the ruled lines, some breaking out past them.
She stood in the doorway and didn't go in. Zhou Shu finished the third, capped the pen, looked up and saw her, and said, that's all for today.
She gave an mm. The desk calendar lay pressed under the telephone; she went over, drew it out, turned it up to next Wednesday's square. In that square stood small printed characters: the first of the twelfth month. With the pencil she set a dot in the square, thought, and traced the dot into a small circle. Traced, she pushed the calendar back under the telephone, pressed a little deeper than before.
Five days.