On the morning of the nineteenth of the twelfth month, He Che's call came first, half an hour ahead of the snow. He spoke slower than usual on the other end, one sentence to a sentence, saying that the bureau together with the district enforcement team had moved on the secondhand stalls this morning, that several stallholders had been taken away for questioning all together, that Wang Chaosheng was on the list. The charge, he said, was trafficking in archival materials and recordings of unknown origin; the evidence had been half a year in the gathering; the net was closing before New Year; the nod had been given at the bureau's affairs meeting by Gu Ling. There he stopped, and the length of the pause she could hear now — the kind of pause that weighs the second half of a sentence before deciding whether to let it out — and then he said that during the black-market sweep one tape had passed through hands, the date on its label written as the registration year, that they had asked him where that tape came from, and that he had said: that one I don't ask about.
She held the receiver and looked out the window. The snow hadn't come down yet; the sky was that held-down white. She said, I know. He Che said, one more thing — before the stalls were moved, someone had gone to the old mill first asking after a tape, the Sixth Session's; the old comrade at the door hadn't owned to it; the ones who came had left empty-handed. She said, which day. He Che said, the day before yesterday. She reckoned it: the day before yesterday was the seventeenth of the twelfth month. In the soft notebook she entered the item, the pen tip pausing once, and then she changed the two characters for "the day before yesterday" into "the seventeenth."
Inside an hour of hanging up, Gu Ling's call came too, three sentences and no more. The first said the case had been flagged to him and had to move before New Year — drag it past the holiday and those few would have the goods moved clean out. The second said: your tape — the file has no you in it, and never will. The third he said slowest: whatever has passed through whose hands, the paper has a count of it, and the paper's numbers hold longer than people do. She listened, ran the three sentences through her head once, and didn't answer; both ends of the line stayed quiet a little while, and it was he who hung up first.
A little past three in the afternoon the postman rang downstairs. On the parcel slip the sender's line held a crooked, scrambling name, the characters climbing out of their boxes, the final stroke of the last character flung out long and lying across one corner of the postmark. The postmark was the fifteenth of the twelfth month, the county office's, its ink laid down uneven. In the stairwell she already had the kraft paper split along one seam; upstairs, seated at the table, she spread the whole sheet open.
There was no letter in the box. One cassette tape, in a metal shell, the label carrying only two characters, in pencil, the writing pushed past the edge of the label's box: Seventh Session. One of the screws in the shell had been changed, its cross slot now a straight slot, driven in deep. Through the little window the tape looked full, wound even, no fuzz at the edges. She turned the cassette over in her hands and back; the glue on the back of the label had gone old and lifted one small corner. She didn't peel it.
She phoned Zhou Yu. Zhou Yu said from the other end, there's one at my parents' place, I used it in college, second cardboard box in the storage room — don't go poking at it yet, wait for me. She said, I can poke at it. Zhou Yu paused two seconds and said, then poke — clean the head with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol, and don't blow on it with your mouth.
The machine was heavier than she'd expected. When Zhou Yu dug it out of the cardboard box, the replacement belt he'd ordered online had already been there three days — this man had always done such things that way, the person not yet moving, the parts already arrived. She cleaned the head, loaded the batteries, pressed play, and let it run blank a minute: the transport's hiss was even, no crackle. She turned the volume to half.
Zhou Shu carried a stool over and sat down beside her, the knitting needles still in her hand, a small coil of red yarn wound on her knees. After a short stretch of current, overture-like, a child's voice came out of the tape.
The voice counted first. One. Two. Three. Counted loud, seven on one breath with no changing of air; at eight it broke, laughed once, started over. This wasn't her. Her ears had the voice named by the second sentence — Wang Chaosheng thirty years gone, eight-year-old Wang Chaosheng, big-voiced, no space between one word and the next, the report-and-forget kind of reporting, different from every Wang Chaosheng in the files, in thirty years of retelling, on the black market's half-true mimeographed sheets. This one, on this tape, was alive.
Then a second voice came in and carried the string across the place where it had broken. That was her. She heard her own seven-year-old voice, half a tone lower than Wang Chaosheng's, setting the words out one at a time — set one out, wait for it to land steady, set out the next. At twenty-nine, one breath taken. Her hand pressed once on the table's edge, and what it pressed was that spot on a table edge thirty years gone. Zhou Shu, listening beside her, heard that breath and pressed the coil of yarn against her knees, saying nothing. The first side ran a while; then Zhou Shu asked quietly, Mom, when you were little, your voice took after me. She said, it took after your grandma. Zhou Shu said oh, set the topic down, and never picked it up again.
The tape walked toward the middle. The two voices began to build together. One bounced; the other joined. Wang Chaosheng sprang out half a word, like a handful of nails poured onto a table, and her voice lined the nails up one by one, one by one, into a sentence. At one place Wang Chaosheng couldn't join, stuck; her voice had just started up to take it when he shouted, don't say it! — and then held his own breath ten-odd seconds and squeezed out a wrong one, laughing first at himself, saying, today's me doesn't report that one, a rule is a rule — this stretch she remembered whole. The four rules were the two of them's own: no prompting, no turning back to ask, no patching, what wouldn't join got thrown, and thrown meant not reported that day — so that neither owed the other anything. The files called it paired-translation discipline, five characters, red pen. The tape called it the rules, two characters, shouted by a child.
At one place the two of them quarreled, over number eleven — one said snow, the other said no, snow that had fallen. She listened, her finger tapping twice on the table's edge without her knowing; this way of quarreling she remembered, the files had it, the ledger had it — but what the ledger never set down was Wang Chaosheng going slack in the middle of the quarrel, saying, all right, yours, yours is right, and tipping back in his chair when he finished, a chair leg knocking the floor. The knock was recorded too. In thirty years, no sheet of paper had ever recorded that knock.
A little past the middle of the tape, the two voices built the sentence from the end of that month. It says, not quite there yet. A little bit more and it'll be steady. That was her saying it, one word at a time, space between the words, spaced exactly as it was in the copy in the file. She had read the file hundreds of times. In the file, behind that sentence, stood a parenthetical note: semantics, to verify. On the tape, behind that sentence, stood no note — only Wang Chaosheng, voice dropped low: hey, this one's good, this one's worth money. The file didn't have that either. She said, what's worth money. He said, worth money anyway. On the tape the two of them laughed a while, the laughter not landing together; she stopped first.
Further on, the tape went silent for a stretch.
Silent a long time. She counted: five seconds, ten. The hiss lay underneath, nothing else. The needles in Zhou Shu's hands stopped. She thought the tape had reached its end, or that that side had broken off here, and her wrist had already risen to press stop — when, on the tape, the seven-year-old voice opened its mouth again.
The voice said: Like setting one more bowl on a stack of bowls. It's on. My hand still doesn't dare let go.
One word at a time, set out slow, in a grown-up's tone. Her hand hung above the stop key and stayed. On the tape, the voice finished and was finished — nothing before, nothing after, no "it says," no explanation; three beats, and Wang Chaosheng's voice came back asking, what did you say? The voice didn't answer; it went on with the numbers. Fifty-one — no, not fifty-one: forty-two. After forty-two came forty-three. The two voices built together again, as close as before, as if that sentence had never come out at all.
In the kitchen, the cup she hadn't washed that morning still lay in the sink. Getting up just now she had knocked it over, and by now it lay on the basin's bottom, the tap not shut tight — drip, drip. She stood at the table; how long she stood she didn't know. Zhou Shu spoke first. Zhou Shu said, Mom, I've said that line. The night of the first of the twelfth month.
She said, I know.
What she said was I know; what ran through her was an account. This sentence she had not heard a second time in thirty-odd years. The first was the registration year, at the half table at the east end of the mill office's ground floor, when the recorder asked her to say the heaviest word once more and she couldn't get it out — from then on this sentence stood in her books as a bad debt, the principal lost, nothing left but that small line of pencil in the files. The second was the night of the first of the twelfth month, Zhou Shu sitting under the lamp, saying, like setting one more bowl on a stack of bowls, it's on, my hand still doesn't dare let go. She had recognized it then; recognizing it, she hadn't said so — she had only moved the debt from one child's name to another child's name. Now, the third time, the debt came back to where it had started: her at seven, in the gap of the paired translating, knowing nothing of before or after, nothing of it mattering, saying it and going straight back to counting — leaving it, in her own mouth, on a tape nobody had thought anything of. The machine can't record it — that she had believed for thirty years; the machine could record none of the rest, and this one sentence alone it had kept. How to enter this account she couldn't work out. She knew whom to take it to.
She rewound the tape. Back to that sentence, played it again. A second time. A third. After two hearings Zhou Shu went back to her room, saying as she left, Mom, I'm not listening to the rest — your session's business. She didn't ask where "your session's business" had been learned.
At the tape's tail there was one short stretch more. Wang Chaosheng's voice alone — recorded, it seemed, after the other one had already gone — speaking into the microphone: coming tomorrow? A pause, and he answered himself: coming. Then nothing, hiss running to the end.
She pressed stop. The room went quiet, and inside the quiet, the water sound of the radiators.
She ejected the tape, put it back in its metal shell, and sat under the lamp working out where it had come from. Thirty years of collecting, and Wang Chaosheng had passed the Sixth Session's blank tapes through his hands one by one; the black-market saying that every session had left one real tape was half a thing he had made up himself — he had owned to that. He had wanted to buy hers and named his price: one tape of her from that year for one signed waiver. She had given him a false one — a scrapped test tape erased three times, recorded at an empty room: two knocks on the heating pipe and, at the end, one cough. He had checked it through — that cough was hers — and taken it anyway, saying the content didn't matter. She had thought then that his hands held nothing: empty is empty, I'll think of something else — and in the days he said that, this tape had already been lying thirty years in his storeroom, or in some cardboard box in his house. The two characters on the label were a child's writing. He had kept the real thing to the last, kept it to within a few days of being taken away, stuck on the stamps, and handed it to the owner of the other voice on this same tape. Once a tape has passed hands, there's no such thing as handing it back — that was something else he had said. With this one handing-over, he had turned that saying over too.
She thought to write him something. Three lines on paper, torn up. The charge sat where it sat; the man had been taken away that very morning; where this letter of hers would go, to whom — the paper had a count of it, and the paper's numbers hold longer than people do. She balled the torn paper and dropped it into the stove and watched it burn out. When it had burned she pulled the drawer open again and slid the receipt out for one look. One cassette tape received. Two boxes for the date, one character to a box. At the time he had said: the characters — that can wait for the ceremony day. The ceremony had passed, the refusal to translate had passed, and the characters had never come; the tape had come back by itself. She put the receipt back, pressed it on top of the stack where it had been.
She brought over the tin box at the bedside and opened it; the tape brought back from the old mill twelve days earlier lay inside. She set today's in beside it, the two lying side by side, and the box held them exactly. One held her twelve-year-old voice and the lesson; one held her seven-year-old voice and that sentence. She closed the lid, set the tin box back at the bedside, and didn't lock it. The stack of papers in the drawer she left alone — the authorization forms, the receipt, the suspension notice, each in its own slot.
At ten o'clock Zhou Yu called, asking whether the day had anything that needed signing. She said no, and added: a tape has come into the house — when you're back, listen; there's a voice on it you know. Zhou Yu went quiet a moment on the other end and said, the Seventh Session's. She said, how did you know. Zhou Yu said, a guess. He said, the head — I'll come back on the weekend and put a better one in for you. Only after hanging up did it land with her: the three characters "Seventh Session's" in Zhou Yu's mouth had come out the way a man calls off a part number.
She dialed Wei Dongquan. Six rings, and it was answered. She said, it's arrived. Quiet on the other end, the water sound of the radiators traveling down the line. Wei Dongquan said, arrived is good. A pause. He said, that year he came by the shop and asked me whether I had the Seventh Session's. A pause. He said, I said I didn't. She said, you knew then that there was one? Another pause, long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer, and then: I knew there was. I didn't know where. A pause. He said, a thing like where — it can't be hurried; you have to wait for it to come out by itself. She said, it's come out. He said, then that's good. This time it was he who hung up first.
The desk calendar slid out from under the telephone; she turned it to the nineteenth of the twelfth month. With the pencil she counted backward, starting from the thirty-five in the box on the eighth, one box a day, counting to today: twenty-four. In the box for the nineteenth she set a dot, pressed light, the same weight as the dot on the seventh, twelve days before.
The snow came down. She didn't go close the window; she stood before it a while, the streetlamp lighting the snow into one square after another. In the room, the single-well deck still stood on the table; she reached out and moved it inward, to the inner side of the table's edge, a little farther from the edge. She went back to bed and lay down, and didn't go listen. That small floor of sound still in her ears swayed once, stopped a while. She followed it.
Twenty-four days left.