Zhou Yu got home in the small hours of the second day of the twelfth month; the sound-activated stairway light came on twice, and when the key turned its second circle in the lock Lin Wanzhao rose from the sofa — she hadn't been asleep, hadn't turned on the light either, and by the sliver of streetlight in the curtain gap she watched him set his bag on the shoe cabinet and set on the bag a form he had printed himself, its first line reading List of Items Requiring Guardian Signatures, with a dozen-odd empty lines beneath, ruled by his own hand, the columns two millimeters narrower than the bureau's standard format — the same flaw as that forty-eight-hour notice sheet.
List them, he said. Which papers need a parent's signature — list them for me. From today to her birthday, one by one, I sign.
She said there was nothing to sign now; the notice had been signed. Zhou Yu opened the form to its second page, and on the second page he had already filled in three items himself: the family-opinion field for the re-listening, the field for filing her conduct at school during the suspension, and one she had never seen, the Confirmation Thirty Days Before Window Closure. He said the first two he had asked out of them, the third he had pried out of Attachment 2 — the bureau's procedure ran to a guardian's confirmation thirty days before the window closed, and: this item comes every year, and every year nobody reads it. This year I'm reading it.
She took the form from him. He stood in the doorway and waited until she had finished reading before going to wash up. Once the water was running, the inner room's door opened a crack; Zhou Shu stood in the crack, said nothing either, glanced at the form in her hand, and eased the door shut again. The next morning she found the form pressed under Zhou Shu's math homework, pressed flat, as if it had been under there all night.
Zhou Shu was suspended from school and home in the daytime. On the second day of the month the home phone rang three times: the first was the station asking for the official line, and she answered by the three points the station had sent down; the second was an unfamiliar number, two rings and dead; the third was the neighbor from upstairs, asking whether to carry down Shushu's homework, and after asking she didn't hang up, sighed on her end, Lin Wanzhao sighed too, and both sides rang off. Zhou Shu had done half of the exam papers Teacher Zheng had sent over by hand; the other half lay spread on the desk — the person was in no hurry; it was the papers that looked hurried.
She had assumed that a retired Chinese class would come down, in essence, to leading her through those fifty words again — what had been on her own mouth at twelve was long gone, and of that mother and daughter were both sure. Zhou Shu never went anywhere near the mouth. That afternoon, with the heating making the room stuffy, Zhou Shu turned her swivel chair around, sat her down in it, and said: Mom, don't move. Just listen.
Listen to what.
Listen to that thing you listen to every day, Zhou Shu said. You've listened to it thirty years. You treat it as background. Today, don't treat it as background.
She said she couldn't hear anything in it; she had come up doing measurements, and by the station's rules the underhum was a quantity to be deducted, not a quantity to be listened to. Zhou Shu said: right — the deducted one exactly. Deduct it first, then listen to what's left.
That afternoon she sat forty minutes and heard nothing. The water in the radiators went its own way, the fridge's compressor stopped and started again, cars passed under the window — old acquaintances, all thirty years of them. Zhou Shu didn't hurry her, just sat on the edge of the bed knitting that bit of red yarn — the vest still wasn't cast on, and the measurement slip pinned to the bamboo needles had gone soft — and said, once in a while: wrong. You're hunting for words. Don't hunt. It has no words for you to find.
The next day Zhou Shu changed methods: instead of listening in the room, she was to go downstairs, walk to the wet market and walk back, thinking of nothing on the way. She walked forty minutes. The sour breath of the pickle vats in the market, the chop of spareribs — two chops and a pause — the short flutter of plastic bags in the wind, all of it filed past her ears in a line. At her own door she stopped, and stood there a while, unable to say what she was waiting for. Coming in, Zhou Shu looked at her once, laid the yarn down on her knees, and said: now we're getting somewhere.
On the afternoon of the second, He Che called, saying that the matter from the text messages — talk or not, today was fine either way. She set the place in the small conference room on the station's third floor; the whiteboard's hook was still loose, and as before the projector stayed off. He Che came pulling the wheeled case with the noisy wheel, didn't open it on entering, and first set a photocopied page on the table and slid it across.
The tape first, he said. The bureau is tracing the black market. Something happened before New Year on the old-goods line — someone was buying 'one tape per session,' buying the full set, the Second through the Sixth, all of them blank; one tape alone passed through hands, its date the registration year. Whose hands that tape passed from, the bureau can't trace; if they trace it, they'll come asking. I'll tell you first: brought to me, I answer by the book.
She said that tape was blank, a test tape.
I know it's a test tape, He Che said. I checked the format. The man who took delivery gave up his shop before New Year and never went home; his people say he went south, and past 'south' there was nothing more. What the bureau wants is him, not you. The problem is this— He turned the photocopied page around and pointed her to a line in the middle. It was an excerpt from the literature, lead-type print heavy with translationese, on a phenomenon named "post-translation eidetism": seen in the follow-up files of elderly translation officers, patients who had been away from the voices over there for years could still pick out of ambient noise a rise and fall at even intervals, reporting it as "like someone breathing very far away"; all three patients were serving translation officers from before the Seventh Session; and at the end of the excerpt stood one line: never seen among non-translation officers.
That line was written twenty-odd years ago, He Che said. The man who wrote it didn't know that among non-translation officers there are people who hear it too. I've heard it. Four hours; the baseline was flat, a straight line on the paper, and I alone knew what I had heard — nothing at all, and yet I was listening. That sentence has no way into the archive. The archive's format asks me for a measured value; I have no measured value to give; all I can give is "nothing abnormal observed." He stopped a moment and drew the black notebook out of the case's side pocket, the rubber band slid back to the notebook's middle. So that book of mine keeps more and more in it. Last week I entered one more: between Children's Tongue and Chinese there is no such thing as translation. They are two languages, and what stands between them is not words — it is ways of listening. Admit that, and thirty years of the ledger has to be read differently, half of it. I build systems; I know what it costs to change a reading. I'm saying it anyway.
She asked him who else he had told that sentence to.
You, He Che said. You're the first.
He left that page of the literature on the table. Packing up, the case's wheel dragged one loud scrape across the floor, and he stood holding the case a moment and asked, was she going to the re-listening tomorrow. She said yes. He said, then I'll be on the technical bench, and you're still at the side of the stage. Having said it he remembered something and added: when your daughter teaches you to listen, don't use that word-hunting effort. She asked how he knew Zhou Shu was teaching her. He Che pressed down the case's handle and said: she told me herself, in a text — one line: I'm teaching my mom to listen.
On the third day of the twelfth month, the Verification Section re-listened to those four minutes.
The Verification Section's room sat on the second-floor corner, half its curtain drawn year-round; on the desk an old tape deck and a disc burner; the wall clock two minutes fast on standard time, fast for who knew how many years, and nobody corrected it — everything in that room carried a slightly let-it-stand air of old error. She didn't go in; she stood by the side door at the corridor's end, and through the half-open door could see a row of monitors. The four minutes of tape played twice: the first pass on the instrument side, that stretch of the tape-run timeline where the waveform was a straight line, straight to the point of nothing markable; the second pass was an open play, run through the speakers. The second pass was what Gu Ling had asked for. He sat in the center chair, no headphones, hands folded on the desk, and listened from one minute before the frame where Zhou Shu lifted off the headphones until the red light went out.
When it finished, no one in the room spoke. The Verification Section people waited for him to rule, pens all hovering. Gu Ling said: write it up. Equipment: no abnormality.
The five characters sounded familiar to her; it took her a few seconds to place where she'd heard them — not from her own experience, but handed down from the generation before: inside the door and out, one door between, and the person outside the door had reported upward the same way, four characters, finishing the machine's sentence for it. She watched Gu Ling through the door's crack. Gu Ling wrote something in his own notebook, slowly, and closed it when done, and tapped the pen twice on the closed cover. The Verification Section people asked how to fill the family-opinion field. Gu Ling glanced toward the door and said: if the family has words, let the family fill it in themselves; don't write it for her.
Leaving, he caught up with her in the corridor, and the two of them walked one ahead of the other to the stairwell. He said the human testimony couldn't enter the review report — don't count on that. He paused, the way he was used to, waiting for her to take it up; she didn't. So he went on by himself: I've listened to those four minutes now. There was nothing in them. He paused again, and this pause ran longer than his usual ones. When I taught, I had a fault grading essays — I always wanted to smooth the students' sentences out for them. Only after I entered the bureau did I learn that some sentences are right not to run smooth. He went down three steps and turned back with the last of it: Your daughter's pause — I'll find a place to put it. If I can't find one, I'll keep it in my own book.
She stood at the stairwell head and heard his steps go all the way down, each one fainter than the last.
On the night of the fourth, she heard it.
Not on purpose. She was lying in bed, the room's light off, Zhou Shu's room dark too, the water in the radiators keeping its own rhythm, and she had been counting the signatures she'd signed that day — Zhou Yu's list had gained two more items — when, counting, the thing came. First one very light rise-and-fall, arriving from very far off, not landing on the ear but on a place a little further in; one sway. A stretch of quiet. Another one. The quiet stretches were all the same length. She took it for the fridge at first; the fridge's compressor doesn't stop and start that evenly. She took it for her own pulse; the pulse was faster than this, and closer together. She lay without moving and followed the count. At eleven she had the interval; somewhere in the thirties she found that the breath in her chest was walking to it — it swayed, she drew breath; it stopped, she held; it swayed again, and only then did she let the breath go down.
Like someone breathing very far away. Once, once.
It had no words. She was certain it had no words — no word-meaning could fit inside that rise and fall, and it matched none of the fifty entries; even He Che's two boxes of cards had no place to put it. It was only a way of going, a way of breathing, there before all words. She had listened to it thirty years and deducted it thirty years; the deduction records ran fifty-two volumes a year, and every volume carried clean. She understood all at once what Zhou Shu had meant by don't hunt for words: a word-hunting ear listens selectively, and an ear that listens selectively can only hear background; the selecting effort has to be let go of entirely before it gets its turn to come in.
She didn't turn on the light. In the dark she felt the soft notebook over, felt for the pen, and by touch alone set down a line — the interval. Not seconds; she hadn't counted seconds. What she wrote was "one long, eleven short": one long rise-and-fall, then eleven short ones, then a long one again. Done, she laid the notebook back at the bed's head. The page of literature He Che had left was pressed under the soft notebook, and on the line reading never seen among non-translation officers she creased a corner with her fingernail. That line was due for a new reading too, she thought; the man who wrote it hadn't waited for this day — the ones waiting were other people.
The next day she asked Zhou Shu about it. She asked carefully, for fear of asking it as a test. She said, Mom heard it — one long, eleven short, and following its breathing, the breath went smooth. Zhou Shu set the red yarn down, looked at her a while, and said: no, Mom. She asked what was no. Zhou Shu said: not eleven — you counted short. There's one more before them, even shorter, so light it's like nothing; you counted it into the gap.
She went still. That night she listened again. Zhou Shu was right. At the very front there was indeed one lighter still, so short it was hardly a rise-and-fall — only a rise, no fall. She counted two more nights before it held steady: twelve short. One long, twelve short. She wrote the number into the soft notebook, and the pen paused as she did — eleven, that number she knew. On registration day, "bright" had been eleven times; on her own twelfth birthday she had tried eleven times, and not once had it come. She didn't think any further down. She closed the notebook.
On the evening of the fifth, the phone came. An unfamiliar number, out of town; she picked up. The background on that end was very quiet, a quiet with a spaciousness she knew, like a big room long empty; far away there came one light metallic ring, one only, no second, as if someone had touched iron against something and set it back down.
I saw you on television, the far end said. A pause. The first of the month. The child lifting off the headphones — I saw it on television.
She held the receiver and made no sound. The voice of that old seven-digit number from thirty years before was slower now than it had been, so slow that every sentence left a stretch of blank behind it, blank scraped clean, waiting for someone to take it up.
The year you were twelve, the far end said. A pause. I counted a noon through for you. You counted yours; I counted mine. That, I've kept to this day.
She said, I remember you.
I have a tape here, the far end said. A pause. Yours. It's been with me thirty years. I've heard— and this pause was the longest, longer than all the pauses before it added together, heard half of it.
She heard herself ask, and the other half.
The far end was quiet a long time. Then the voice said: Come and listen. A pause. Bring the child's pair of ears — and bring your own.
After the phone hung up she sat a long time at the desk. The desk calendar lay pressed under the phone, the little circle on the first of the twelfth month traced twice over; she drew the calendar out, turned it forward, turned to the square of the thirteenth of the first month — Zhou Shu's birthday, the day the window closed — and counted back from that square to today: thirty-eight squares. With a pencil she put a dot in today's square, no circle traced, just a dot, and when it was done she pushed the calendar back under the phone.
Thirty-eight days, left.