The address Wei Dongquan had given her over the phone took her half a day against the map before it matched: the north gate of the old textile mill. The mill had come down in two phases, the workers' housing first, the workshops after, and the demolition had stopped the year before last; a wall fenced in half a stretch of empty ground, and the row of one-story station rooms stood at the far end of it. On the planning map that square was green, printed with the word "retained" — what it retained, the map didn't print. On the seventh day of the twelfth month she got up early, took the long-distance bus to the county seat, changed to a local three-wheeler; at the three words "broadcasting station" the driver stopped and said he didn't know it, and when she had read the address out once he said, then you're going to the old mill — there's no broadcasting station in the old mill, there's just one room left that they didn't pull down.
The bus was crowded, boxes of New Year goods sliding back and forth on the luggage rack, the conductor reaching up to steady them at every stop. She rode with her bag in her arms for two hours. The tape was still in someone else's hands; it was waiting for her in another room. She thought about this the whole way, and somewhere in the thinking she found herself counting the lamps on the ceiling, seven to a row — at the third row, she stopped.
The room didn't take her long to find. The chimney still stood, half of it, pointing at the sky, and she walked toward the chimney; there were no other prints on the snow, one line only, old, frozen hard, running all the way to the door of that row of rooms. A man stood at the door.
The man was fifty-odd, in a half-worn padded army coat, no hat, both hands tucked in his sleeves, standing three steps from the door — not knocking, not looking at the lock, just standing there, and every little while tilting his head toward the crack of the door, as if listening for movement inside. As she came near he gave way half a step, gave way very courteously, and after giving way nodded once toward her, and having nodded went on with his standing.
She said, I'm looking for someone. He said, then go in. A pause, and he added one more thing: this used to be the broadcasting station; I spent a time inside it once, when I was small. She asked who he was waiting for. He changed the way his hands were tucked in his sleeves and said, no one. Just standing a while.
She took the strip of address paper from her bag to check the door plate. At the dip of her head the man glanced her way and asked: Which year did you register?
She said — the word register, it had been thirty-odd years since anyone had used it to her face. She said, the Seventh Session.
The Seventh Session. He repeated it. The repeating was slow, like laying the three words flat one at a time. When they were laid down he said nothing more, gave way another half step toward the side, and cleared the doorway clean for her.
The door wasn't locked; the hasp was bare, the wire gone. She pushed in; the man outside went on standing, and through the shut door she heard him stamp his feet lightly, twice — the stamping of a man keeping warm, not the stamping of a man in a hurry.
There was a stove burning in the room. Wei Dongquan sat on a bench beside it, a size smaller than she had imagined him, folded into a dark padded jacket, his hair gone white — white evenly, like a layer that had settled on him. The cloth bundle was at his knee, its mouth tied, the square corner at its bottom bulging. Seeing her come in, he set down the enamel mug in his hand first, and stood, the standing-up done in two stages. He offered no greetings. He said: You came. A pause. Warm up first. It's cold out.
Beside the stove stood a cassette recorder, single-deck, wooden case, a brand that had been on every street when she was small — seeing it now was like meeting an acquaintance. The machine was wiped clean, its rewind button worn shiny with use. The tape was already in the well; he clicked the well door shut, glanced at the water on the stove, and said: The front is yours. A pause. The back — I've heard it once. Once only.
She asked, and after that once.
Done counting. A pause. Couldn't count out what was inside it. He hesitated, as if hunting for a word, didn't find one, and changed to another sentence: Count, I could count. Hear it — I couldn't hear it. A recorder's ears.
He pressed play.
First came the hiss of tape running, a short stretch, clean hiss; then a child's voice came out pressed close against the hiss, not loud, very steady: one. Two. Three.
She sat without moving. The voice she didn't know — in this life she had never heard her own twelve-year-old voice; there was no way to know it — but the way of counting she knew. One word set out at a time: set out, waited for it to land steady, then the next. At twenty-nine the tape took a breath, a very light one — that small breath she had rested at noon thirty years before came out now from the paper cone just as it had been, and her chest loosened with it, which part had loosened she herself didn't know. At thirty-six the voice set the words out smoothest, like walking on a stretch of familiar ground. At thirty-seven it stopped one beat, like looking for a word it hadn't found. At forty-four, the voice stopped half a beat.
Half a beat. She heard it. It stopped just that much — too short to call a hesitation — and then forty-five came out. She thought of the unfinished half-line in the soft notebook, and of that heavy-in-the-hand page in the retired-records depot. The tape minded none of this; the tape went on counting, forty-six, forty-seven, straight on to fifty, and stopped.
Before the water on the stove came to a boil, it sang for a short stretch. The tape had recorded that stretch too — far away, through the door.
Then the twelve-year-old voice began to speak. It spoke a lesson. One to fifty were things; fifty-one onward were matters not finished; a Chinese word, said, was finished, but a word from over there — the matter unfinished, the word unfinished; handing over at the halfway, both hands on it, neither side letting go. The example of the water was there too — the stretch before the boil, the word all contained in that stretch. The child on the tape set the sentences out one by one, not fast, and stumbled in one place — said "in" twice, and once past it, past it, no going back to say it again. She remembered that stumble; not the tape — the lesson itself, which had had that place in it from the start: the one who taught it had stumbled there, twelve-year-old she had stumbled there learning it, and thirty years later, out of the paper cone, it still stumbled in that same place. One stumble, worn on three people for thirty years, and not one of them had taught it to the other. She sat by the stove and heard it through to the end. She knew who had taught this lesson; the one who taught it now kept a gate in the county seat, night shifts, and came back every twelfth month to stand a while — the one standing outside the door today was, in all likelihood, him.
She didn't ask. She thought of the thing outside the door Master Qiao had spoken of once: the man who listened pressed to the door's crack, who counted numbers in a whisper, who stood a whole noon without drinking water. The voice on the tape went on walking, walked into the noon, and in the child's voice a sleepiness rose, the gaps between sentences slowly lengthening; the last sentence was said, and after it a long, long while, there came one very small movement, like someone laying a face down on the table.
After that, the voice was gone.
The tape still ran. The hiss was still there, only it was no longer the hiss from before — she couldn't have said where the difference lay; forced to say, it was thinner, and thicker: thinner in the layer of absence the voice had left, thicker in something else padding beneath the absence. Wei Dongquan sat across from her, both hands spread on his knees, not watching the machine, watching her.
The second half of the tape began.
The first time through she heard nothing. That was the truth, and she said so. These ears of hers had eaten thirty years of measurement rice, and the first thing the rice bowl had taught them was deduction — deduct the background, deduct the underhum, deduct everything irrelevant, and what remained was what counted. But with this tape's second half, once the deductions were made, nothing was everything: set an instrument here and what it drew would still be a flat line, and she knew with her eyes shut what that line looked like. Wei Dongquan said nothing, and rewound the tape.
The second time through she stopped deducting. She thought of what Zhou Shu had said — don't hunt for words, it has no words for you to find — and of He Che's four hours, a straight line on the paper, the man not lifting the headphones. She moved the effort of listening off her ears, set it farther back, set it on her chest, and walked with the hiss. Somewhere past the thirtieth second she reached it: one long rise-and-fall, a string of short ones stitched after it. She counted. One long. Twelve short. Another long. Twelve short. The intervals held — even in a way no machine under the sun managed, for machines tire and this did not tire. It swayed once, held quiet a stretch, swayed again: the same way of going as the breath she had fallen in with on the fourth night, in her own dark room.
Her chest took up its walk. It swayed, she drew breath; it stopped, she held; it swayed again, she let it out.
Halfway through the third pass, a little sound went out of her throat with it. Very light, breath-voice, no word in it, no word it could make — it only took a small shape against that rise and fall, the way, when someone calls from the far bank, you send the tune back across, and whether it carries words doesn't matter. She followed two long rise-and-falls; at the third, the breath-voice in her throat steadied by itself, steady as something rehearsed. She herself knew: it had never been rehearsed. In her whole life she had never made such a sound — no character-form for it in the dictionary, no number for it on the cards. Wei Dongquan reached over and pressed the machine to a stop.
The room was left with the sound of water on the stove.
This is it, he said. A pause. Thirty years — the first person ever to meet it and match.
She said, I never learned it. No such sound among the fifty words, none in the dictionary, none on the cards; after her twelfth year nothing at all had remained on her mouth — the assessment form had written that cleanly: no residue.
It isn't in the words, Wei Dongquan said. He hunted for words a while, didn't find them, changed to another sentence: Words came later.
She asked, the one time you counted — what did you count out.
He opened his hand and looked into his own palm, as if the count were recorded there. The intervals, he said. A pause. One long, twelve short. I counted three times; three times the same. He closed the hand. The intervals I could count. What the intervals held inside, I couldn't hear. These ears of mine counted themselves out to the end thirty years ago. He pushed the enamel mug a little toward her; the water in it had long gone lukewarm. That's why I had to wait for you. Wait for a pair of— He stopped long, this stop longer than all his stops, a pair of ears that are not mine to govern.
He drew the tape out and fitted it into a tin box; the tin had once carried a label, the label was gone, a shallow ring of glue left behind. He put the tin into her hands.
Take it away, he said. A pause. Kept with me, it's reached its end.
She held the tin. It was cool; while the tape inside had been running she hadn't felt how heavy it was, and now, stopped, it was heavy after all. She thought of the square thing in his bundle — the cloth bundle still tied at his knee, the square corner at its bottom still bulging — she looked once, and didn't ask. He saw the look too, drew the bundle a little toward his own side, and said: That one's not urgent. A pause. That one is another matter altogether.
Going out, the man was still there. Same spot, not shifted, still three steps off, head still tilted. Seeing her come out, he looked first at the tin box in her hands, looked for two seconds, and then asked: It recorded?
She stopped. Thirty years before, Master Qiao's machine had recorded nothing from a roomful of children; that she had believed for thirty years — and now this box of tape carried a faint cool through from where she held it to her. Cool. She said, it recorded.
The man nodded, slowly. He said: That year I was in there too. Recorded one of my own. A pause. He said: Blank.
With that he turned and walked, not fast, the hem of the padded army coat brushing the snow; after a stretch he drew a hand out of his sleeve and waved it back over his shoulder, half a greeting and half a farewell, without turning his head. She stood at the door watching the back go toward the chimney, and suddenly thought of the question he had asked her coming in — which year did you register — and of the repeat: the Seventh Session. She took half a step after that back, and stopped. On the snow his prints met the line he had come by, two lines of prints joined end to end, like a man who had finished walking a road left for himself.
On the ride back she didn't listen to the tape. The tin was in her bag, and she kept a hand pressed on the bag the whole way. At dusk she got home; Zhou Shu sat at the desk, the red yarn cast on at last, cast on slowly, a few stitches just hanging on the bamboo needles. Zhou Yu's list lay open on the desk's corner, one more line added today in Zhou Yu's hand: the date of the Confirmation Thirty Days Before Window Closure — the eleventh of the first month.
Zhou Shu looked up, looked at her, looked at the tin box in her hands, and didn't ask what was on the tape. What Zhou Shu asked was another thing: The back of it — you heard it?
She said, I heard it. Twelve short ones, the intervals the same.
Zhou Shu stopped the stitches in her hands, counted the cast-on stitches, and said when the count was done: The day I was suspended, what it said in those four minutes was this same way of going. She said, what I counted was eleven. You counted one more than me.
She said, the one counted extra is at the very front, so light it's like nothing.
Right, Zhou Shu said. That one is the opening. Only after it opens does the counting get its turn. She laid the knitting on her knees. Mom, don't write it down. Just walk with it. Writing it down hauls the whole word-apparatus back in again.
At ten Zhou Yu called, in a gap between commissioning tests out of town, and asked whether there were papers to sign today. She said none. He said, then I list it for tomorrow. Off the phone she looked once at the list; beside the Confirmation Thirty Days Before Window Closure line Zhou Yu had noted one line in small characters: seven days before the eleventh of the first month — sign early.
At night she set the tin at the bed's head, didn't put it in the drawer — the drawer held that stack of paper, the authorization, the receipt, the suspension notice, and she didn't want the tape sleeping among them. She read the page of literature He Che had left once more, down to the line reading never seen among non-translation officers, the nail-creased corner still there. What the man who wrote that line had never seen, she had been seeing one thing after another these past days: herself, a non-translation officer — no; she had answered thirty years of forms, and on the forms her standing was translation officer, only what had been on her mouth she had handed back at twelve, the assessment form reading no residue — and a woman with no residue had matched that rise-and-fall twice in three days, once in a dark room, once in front of this tape. There was a reckoning in that. She couldn't work it now; she knew who could: the one who had slipped the card for score and instrument into the person column, and the one who had had the tape played over open speakers at the re-listening.
The desk calendar came out from under the phone, turned to today, the seventh of the twelfth month. With a pencil she counted forward: the eighth, thirty-five; the ninth, thirty-four. She put a dot in the seventh's square, pushed the calendar back, the tin at the bed's head, and lay down without going to listen.
That bit of floor was still in her ears. One sway, a stretch of quiet. She didn't count. She walked with it.