Chapter 8Her Name Is—

The curtain of censorship came down from above.

There was no sound, and no wind. A patch of black that reflected nothing pressed down from the roof of the hall. Its four edges cut into the jade-white walls at once, and carved a whole block out from between her and the upper steps. The black came down to the top of her head, then to the height of her shoulders, and stopped.

Her glasses were in the left pocket of her jacket, and she was not wearing them. Everything in front of her had gone soft at the edges. Only the black was hard.

She stood twelve tiles from the first step. She had counted that when she came into the hall, back when the number had no use yet.

She tried to speak.

“I—”

The word left her mouth and went into the black. She could not hear where it landed. There was no echo. She could not find even the edge of the sound. She raised her hand and slapped it against the surface of the curtain. There was no shadow beneath her palm, and there was not a gap between her hand and the black. The key ring on her wrist struck the curtain and made no sound.

She drew her work ID card from the right pocket. It was a plastic case with rounded edges, and the photograph faced out. She pressed the card against the curtain and pushed it down. Its edge met the black and stopped. The curtain had no hole and no seam at its edges. There was not one place where a card could slide in.

“What cannot be seen never happened.”

He spoke through the black. It was one voice. Each character landed on the beat, and when he stopped there was no echo. He did not lower his head, and his arms did not move. He stood at the top, in the middle of that step. His feet had not moved since she entered the hall. The jade-white gown fell to below his knees. At his waist an ink-black sash was tied tight, with nothing hanging from it. Both hands were wrapped in white cloth, wound from the base of the fingers to the wrist, the fists closed over the palms and held against his chest.

When he finished, his right fist came down into his left palm. There was no sound.

Her feather shapes folded in. The feather pieces on either side closed inward first, down to the width of a narrow band, and then lay back against her shoulder blades. The beam above her head was cut off at the top edge of the curtain. She could not see it. She felt only the top of her head go cool.

The string of arcs was the last to go.

It began to turn grey from the outermost ring. The colour was drawn out quickly, and its brightness had not dropped at all. The grey rings were still bright, only without colour.

The second time, his right fist came down once more, and the middle ring turned grey with it. Somewhere outside the hall something else went dark. She could not see where.

The third time, his right fist came down again. The innermost ring had turned grey too.

One thin line was still left above her collarbone. It was her own, and it had no colour.

She raised her arm to start the form.

Her arm pushed as if through water. Halfway through bending the elbow, the whole forearm sank, pressing down on the air and on something invisible laid over it. She put her shoulder into it, and the shoulder sank too. She opened her mouth, but only one breath came out. It was squeezed up out of her throat and reached a point two fingers above her collarbone, and there it was pressed down. The pressure was exact. She knew which two fingers.

The breath was short, as short as if it had been snipped.

The barrage pressed down from the top edge of the curtain.

Harmony characters, one after another, grey-white and tiny, packed so densely they ran together. Where they landed on her shoulders, they stopped. Where they landed on the shawl, they pinned it. The shawl lay spread on the ground, pinned into one flat sheet of cloth. She lowered her head and saw the tips of her two shoes. The water print on the sole was still there. The characters fell into it, and the print broke apart.

She was as small as a grain of dust.

She did not shout. Her right hand could still move. She laid it on the outside of her thigh. Tap. Tap. One strong beat and three weak.

The steps lay ahead of her, jade-white, twenty-seven of them. Seen from below, each step was narrower than the one beneath it, and the edge of every step was so straight there was no trace of wear. The lowest step rose only a finger’s height above the ground. It was like a threshold, its top flat. Twenty-seven. She had counted twice, and both times the number was the same.

At the top of the steps, behind him, stood a wooden post, ink-black, a good deal taller than a man. An old crack ran down the post, and lodged in the crack was a small scrap of white cloth. From a distance it was only a speck of white.

※

Her grandfather had taught her that tap. The strong beat was kept clear, so that there was room for the words when they came back.

When her grandfather told a story, the front of the stage held only a square table, a folding fan and a wooden clapper. He never stood up. He made the beat with the tip of his foot. The sole of his shoe knocked lightly on the stage boards, and the people below heard it and knew the sentence was to stop. When she was seven she sat at the side of the stage and watched that foot, not his face. On the upper of that shoe was a crease, worn in by resting the foot in the same place every day.

Later she learned the foot too. In the backstage of the storytelling hall, nobody taught her. She practised against a block of wood: a tap, another tap, then a stop. She kept at it until the knock of the wood landed as loud as that foot had landed on the stage.

Her grandfather never finished that story. In the year she turned eleven, he stopped halfway through the last episode he told. He stopped on the third beat, his foot held above the stage boards, and did not bring it down. The audience waited a long time. Someone called out, and only then did he bring the foot down. He said, “Tomorrow, then,” and put his folding fan away. The next day the storytelling hall did not open.

The business of the back lane had also come to her through that same beat.

Behind the night stall ran a narrow lane, two steps wide, leading round behind a pillar of the elevated road. Empty beer crates were stacked in the lane. The stall owner squared them up every day, stacking them against the foot of the wall. At one end of the lane there was no light. At the other end there was one lamp, shining on a low stool. A sheet of newspaper was pinned under one of the stool’s legs.

Last autumn she first walked under that lamp, because she had heard someone humming.

It was a tune from her grandfather’s story. In the third episode there was a strong beat that fell on the second beat, and her grandfather always dragged it, dragged it until the audience counted it out for themselves. The man humming did not drag. He moved that beat forward by half a beat, and not by much, and he carried every phrase that way.

She stood behind the empty crates and listened to the whole phrase.

Later she tried that phrase in her own draft too. On that beat the strong beat came out half a beat longer, the way the man had hummed it. She told no one. She only kept that half beat, leaving it for someone who would come, though she did not know when.

He sat on the low stool, mending an umbrella.

A black umbrella lay open across his knees, its ribs showing one by one. In his hand was a length of fine iron wire. He wound it round the base of one rib, twice, cut it off, and pressed the end flat with his thumb. The umbrella had sixteen ribs. She counted them. Among the sixteen, one was a little darker in colour, and at its joint a band of new copper had been bound round it.

When he had finished that rib, he folded the umbrella, tapped it twice against his knee, and tapped out one strong beat and three weak. Only then did he seem to notice. He paused, tapped once more, and it was still one strong beat and three weak. Each time the tip of the umbrella struck the concrete it left a white dot. The dots came in threes, linked into a line, and the next three followed on, not hard.

He came every Wednesday to eat noodles. He sat at the table in the corner against the wall. One bowl of noodles, vinegar poured round it twice, no spring onion. When he had finished, he leaned the umbrella against the table leg with its tip facing out, so that it touched no one. When the stall closed, the umbrella was still there. He came back for it first thing the next morning.

What she remembered was the number of ribs. Sixteen. And the one that was darker.

After the stall closed she still went to the back lane and squared up the empty crates. She stacked them against the foot of the wall with the corners lined up, the way the stall owner did. The low stool was gone, but the marks of its legs were still on the concrete: four round marks, one of them deeper than the other three.

The second time she did not hide. She walked to the edge of the low stool and stood outside his shadow. He pressed the last rib flat, looked up, and looked at her glasses. She was not wearing them.

“That one was added later,” he said.

“I saw,” she said.

He opened the umbrella and held it out, canopy up, the tip pointing down, the handle facing her hand. She took the handle, and her palm landed exactly on the section he had just been holding. It was cold, with a thin ring of rust round it.

She did not open it. He did not say a second sentence.

After that he did not come for a while. The umbrella was still with her, and it still had sixteen ribs.

※

“Demoted three levels. You may now speak only the words that are permitted.”

A voice. Each character landed on the beat, and when it stopped there was no echo.

When he had finished, a panel rose out of the roof of the hall. It was faint, with a jade-white ground and no frame. Its characters were set in rows, one to each cell, and every cell was the same size. The characters rose one by one and sank one by one, like a row of lamps coming on in turn under water. In the upper right corner of the panel was a line of small writing. She could not read it, except for its last character, which was ‘register’.

She looked only once. The panel had ‘I’, ‘is’, ‘she’, ‘look’ and ‘see’. It had ‘delete’. It did not have ‘name’.

The panel did not have enough words for what she wanted to say. She counted twice. Only those words were enough.

She opened her mouth.

“What I deleted was not a sentence. It was a person’s name.”

She picked her words. Every word was on the panel, and every word could get out. When ‘delete’ went out, a thin light crossed the curtain, as if someone had drawn a ruler across the cells. When she came to ‘name’, which was not on the panel, she bit the word down into one breath, so that only half of it went out. But that half went out too.

The words she spoke dropped away from the panel one by one. The cells emptied and kept their grey-white ground, with no word and no edge. The panel grew sparser, but she still had words to use, enough to finish.

On the beat when she finished, his arms were still at his chest and had not moved. His gaze was still on the curtain, on the place where she had been speaking.

Her hand pressed the outside of her thigh, down to the second beat.

“Her name is—”

“Stop. That name is not on the register.”

It was faster than every sentence before it, so fast that it did not sound like speech. It was like someone shutting a register. The sound was not drawn out. It stayed close to her ear, and when it was done it was gone. On the panel, the cell for ‘name’ was still empty, its ground grey-white.

When he finished, his right fist came down into his left palm. There was no sound. Both hands were still bound in white cloth, one turn pressed over another, and they had not come loose.

She drew that breath back in.

This breath was her own, and it was whole. The two fingers above her collarbone were still pressing, and she did not let them go. She bit out each word, biting hard, and each word landed on one of the taps on her thigh.

The horizontal line of light outside the wall had not come back. That stretch of the elevated road was still dark, the string of little lamps hanging in the dark, and through this wall she could not find them.

※

Three weeks earlier, at the seventh table.

That day she sat at the edge of the awning, writing. Halfway through she stopped, her thumb rubbing the screen. The phone was propped against the bamboo skewer tube, two fingers in from the edge, its screen facing her. The bowl with the cracked rim sat beside her elbow. The aunt who swept the street was gathering the skewers out from under the table, one by one. The aunt was crouching, with an old crease across the brim of her cap, and her broom, cut on a slant, leaned against her leg. The girl in glasses crouched down beside her and asked what time she knocked off.

The aunt answered: half past ten.

She had written that down in the notes on her phone. Only one time was in it. When she had finished, she turned the phone over, screen down, and pressed it against the edge of the skewer tube. As she pressed, one skewer fell over. She did not set it upright. The stall owner came over and set it upright.

That night she sat at this table until half past ten. That day’s chili oil was half a ladle. He set it at the edge of the bowl, no more than that, and she said nothing about it. The aunt swept the last of the tissues into the dustpan and switched hands. What she saw was a back, not a face. She did not know what the back was sweeping. She knew only that wherever the back swept, that place became clean.

The draft she wrote that night was about that aunt.

She wrote the first draft at this table, on the palm-sized folding keyboard. While she wrote it she did not think of showing it to anyone. When it was done, she did not know where to send it. Her grandfather’s stories had no street sweepers in them. The people in those stories all had a title, and each one was wrapped up within a single episode. The first person she wrote about was one who would not wrap up.

Each of the first six drafts changed in the same way. Adjectives taken out, verbs made softer, full stops changed to commas, one long paragraph split into two short ones. The words around it gave way, draft after draft, so that the line sat in the middle, less noticeable, and could slip through. That line had never given way, not once. The three characters joined together in that line were a person’s name.

By the fourth draft she no longer wrote about the aunt. She kept only that line. In the fifth draft she broke the line apart, one character to a line, with wide gaps between them, gaps as wide as a street. In the sixth draft she joined the line back together, into its original shape, with every mark of punctuation in its original place.

She took a screenshot of every draft. Seven of them were in the album, one for each draft.

What she deleted was that person.

She had never given that person another name. She had always called her the aunt. The name came later. She heard it at the gate of the sanitation depot, from a man who was smoking. It was only three characters. Nothing else came with it.

※

In the water at her feet, what showed was not the roof of the hall.

The pool had come in on the soles of her shoes, one print from the right foot and one from the left. The surface was flat, flat enough to reflect things. What it reflected was a string of lamps.

Warm-orange, small, fifteen of them, hung from a row of iron hooks. Two were dark. Beneath the lamps was the awning. A corner of its plastic sheet had been lifted by the wind and pressed down again by someone. Under the awning a man stood with his back to the water, in the middle of three pots, the flames turned down as low as they would go. His right hand pressed the apron once: a press, and then a wipe.

There was another person at the water’s edge.

Not the stall owner. It was the back of a street sweeper.

The back was bent, its right shoulder lower than its left. One hand held a big broom of bamboo twigs, the twigs slanting to the left, the slanted end wedged in a crack in the ground. The broom was pushed forward, then drawn back. A crease ran across the brim of the cap. With each stroke the water shook and the lamps broke apart, then pieced themselves back together.

One. Two. Three. Stop.

She counted three of them before she realised it was her own strong beat.

The back’s beat was one heavy and two light. The first stroke landed firmly, the next two were light, there was a pause, and then it came back round to the first. Her own beat was the same. She had always believed she had grown it herself.

The back in the water paused for a breath. That breath was short, about the same as the one she had taken a moment before.

She did not look for the face of that back. In the water there was only the back. She looked for a long time, until the surface settled flat again.

She had seen that cap brim too, that day at twenty past ten. She had been sitting under the awning, halfway through writing, when she looked up and saw the slanted end of a broom sweep past the leg of the table. She had not thought about who it was. She lowered her head, deleted that line, and typed it back one character at a time.

Then she pressed her palm into the standing water.

The water was cold. Her palm lay on the floor tiles, the joints lined up one with the next, too fine for a sheet of paper to slide into. She propped herself on one elbow, lifting half her body. The water wicked up her sleeve, reached halfway along her forearm, and stopped.

The first ring lit up.

Colour came back over the grey, little by little, starting from the innermost ring. Cyan seeped out from the inside, to the second ring, then to the third. The rings lay behind her right ear, one after another, and they lit all the way down to her collarbone.

She did not look at the place behind her right ear. She watched the back in the water, and she spoke the last line.

※

“Her name is Zhou Sulan. She has swept the streets for twenty years. Tonight she is still sweeping.”

She did not delete a single word.

None of these words had been picked out, and none had been bitten down into breath. They went out one by one, and each was whole. Zhou Sulan: three syllables, three beats. Twenty years of sweeping the streets: six beats. Still sweeping tonight: six beats.

When the first word went out, the whole great sheet of barrage above her head was pushed open in one piece.

It was not broken. It was pushed open. The grey-white words were shoved outwards one by one, and they pushed out a circle with nothing inside it. At the far end of the hole, a long way off, lay a line of riverbank, a stretch of railing, and the white of a streetlamp. The edge of the hole was furred, like paper torn by hand, its torn edge gone pale. Outside the circle the barrage slanted. Every word had been blown off course by the wind, and they crowded against the rim of the circle, unable to get in. A horizontal band of silver-grey reflected light flashed once, went out, and flashed again.

It was the reflective strip on a vest, washed grey. The white would not come back.

A vertical split opened in the curtain, cut straight down through the middle. What showed through the split was not blank.

It was a person, very small, still sweeping.

As she looked, the person caught the slanted end of the broom in the ground for a moment, lifted it, and changed hands.

She said, “The people not on the register are the city.”

She did not raise her voice. The sound went out, struck the split curtain, fell back, and landed at her own feet, beside the water prints of her shoes.

No one in the hall answered. She waited one beat, but his beat did not come. She lifted her hand from the tiles and set it back on the outside of her thigh. The strong beat was still there. The tap she gave it was a little heavier than before.

※

The barrage came down in pieces onto the floor tiles, and went out before it reached the water.

She lifted the shawl from the ground. The cloth was wet and heavy. The points of light at its end had stopped in the tile joints, a few at a time, and she hooked them out one by one with her fingers. The points no longer rose. They clung to the pads of her fingers, cold and weightless. She shook them out towards the end of the shawl. The ones that would not shake loose she left.

She got to her feet from the tiles, slowly.

She walked forward, counting the tiles one by one. She stopped at the sixth. Six tiles still separated her from the upper steps, and beyond those was a distance to him that she did not want to work out.

She did not walk any further.

She stood on the tiles and looked up at him. His gaze was on the curtain, on the place where she had chosen her words. That place was empty. She stood to one side of the empty patch, so that he would have to turn to see her.

He did not turn.

The wooden post stood behind him, ink-black. In the old crack on the post, the white cloth was still only a speck from a distance.

His right fist rose an inch and stopped at his chest, without coming down into his left palm.

The walls of the hall were still even, equally bright on all four sides. The post made no sound. His fist stayed where it was for a long time.

His left palm was as it had been, turned inward, the white cloth wound round it, one turn pressed over another. His arms were still at his chest.

There was still water on her soles, carried in from outside, one print and then another. Her rubber soles squeaked on the wet tiles, once, a short sound. The shawl hung over her arm, its end falling to the tiles. The points of light no longer rose. A few of them were still stopped in the joints.

She was not wearing her glasses, and he was far away, so she could see only an outline. She did not need to see his face clearly. What she wanted to see was that right fist, and the moment it came down into his left palm.

She looked up at him.

Her chin was not tucked in.