The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  I could see Vice Principal Diller now, standing at the back of the auditorium, wearing a whistle around her neck. It occurred to me that she might intend to monitor the content of the show: to shut off the lights and blow her whistle, were anything inappropriate to appear on stage. Then I remembered that I was in America, where that sort of thing did not occur.

  The lights went down further, and a spotlight appeared in front of the curtain, a pleated fall of burnt orange velvet.

  “It’s starting,” Cece said. “Oh I’m so nervous!”

  I wondered what Cece had to be nervous about.

  “You never know what could happen,” Cece continued. “She could forget the steps or—God forbid—fall down. I’m worried about her. She—”

  But before Cece could say what else she was worried about, a woman in the next row half-turned and shushed us. The dance teacher, Ms. Kirschgraber, entered stage right, her hair pulled into a ponytail so tight the skin on either side of her face appeared stretched. She was wearing tights underneath a long, cotton print skirt; when she walked, her feet pointed out at angles, like a duck’s. I had seen the same walk long ago on some of the lovely creatures exiting the Beijing Academy of Dance, the one time I had been allowed to accompany X to meet Lulu there.

  “Not since I was a principal in the Irina Ivanovna Dancers, auditioning student associates,” began Ms. Kirschgraber—who was not a lovely creature, in part because she was wearing so much green eyeshadow—“have I seen such a talented group of young dancers.”

  “I’m afraid she’s lost too much weight,” Cece whispered, and for a second I thought she was talking about Ms. Kirschgraber, whose collarbones did poke out sharply above the neckline of her leotard.

  “In addition to choreographing their routines, the girls have spent hours rehearsing until late in the evening—as those of you who drive carpool know.” (There was knowing laughter from the parents, although it seemed to me that almost all of the girls old enough to have a license had their own cars as well.) “And since to night is about the girls, I’m going to get off the stage and let them show their stuff. They’ve been working very hard, so if you’ll please give them all a big round of applause…”

  Ms. Kirschgraber was drowned out by a terrific wave of clapping, foot stamping, and (from the young men of William O. Douglas) wolf whistles. Then the lights went off altogether; the curtain flew up; and we were looking at an illuminated, electric blue set. There were two chairs placed at angles in the center of the stage. We heard the opening bars of a catchy song, and four girls cartwheeled onto the stage, two of them impressively manipulating bright pink scarves.

  “That’s her,” Cece whispered, and I saw Olivia, upside down, second from the left. A row of background dancers entered with the same cartwheels, while the girls in front enacted an up-tempo tug-of-war with their scarves.

  “She’s on the beat, isn’t she?” Cece said.

  I gestured to Cece that we should keep our voices down, but the woman in front of us was also whispering to her companion; everyone was pointing out daughters, sisters, and friends to everyone else.

  As we watched, I couldn’t help being mesmerized by the scenery, which was changing from the bottom up, bleeding one color into the next, blue to turquoise to green. The effect of the students leaping and spinning in their black unitards made the background seem to pulse, and I found myself concentrating less on the individual girls—I could hardly tell Katie from Lizzie from Holly at this distance anyway—than the shapes of their flexed black limbs against the glowing scenery.

  Those colors, changing now from lime green to yellow, made me think of Matisse’s chapel at Vence, which I’d first seen in one of my cousin’s books (all of which had been seized and “lost” when the police raided our East Village). For a moment I shut my eyes, and it was as if I were back in that apartment, magically reconstructed in my memory, on the afternoon my cousin and I spent translating his interview for Lu Kou. Or rather, I was translating while X sat on the bed under the window, chain-smoking Honghe cigarettes.

  “What if there could be a city where every building was made by artists?” my cousin had speculated, looking at Matisse’s chapel in the book.

  “No one would be able to cook or sleep or use the bathroom,” I said. “The elevators wouldn’t work, and there would be no place to park your car.” I thought I was being clever; it was the kind of thing Meiling might have said. Like the Bauhaus-inspired architects of Factory 798—where my cousin established his studio after the East Village was gone—Meiling believed that there should be a purpose for every part of a design, whether for a building, a salt shaker, or a cocktail dress.

  But my cousin was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s what would happen,” he said. “I think the buildings would work all right. I think it would be the artists who would change.”

  I thought that sounded good, and I decided to insert it into the interview, although I didn’t really know what he meant. This was at the beginning of April, just as the weather was starting to warm up again. My toes no longer froze on the long bike ride from campus to the East Village, and the jujube tree outside my cousin’s place had started to bloom. Even slightly warmer weather felt so good after the long winter that I don’t think I could’ve imagined anything bad happening to the artists living there. I thought they would just keep going, getting more and more famous, happier and happier. I would graduate from college, find a bohemian apartment like my cousin’s, and begin to do the same sorts of projects he was doing (already our first collaboration, Drip-Drop, was in the works). Eventually Meiling would move in with me. She would start her company, and we would become rich. Perhaps we would even have a baby.

  Certainly my cousin was wiser than I was (it would’ve been hard not to be). But I wonder if he knew what was going to happen, or—this is going to sound strange—even in some sense wished for it. Not that he wanted to go back into detention, of course, or take any of his friends to jail with him, but I think that X had recognized a contradiction in the East Village that spring. As strangers were becoming a regular fixture at our shows (art critics, journalists, and foreign exchange students), my cousin’s performances were evolving. They required more hands to assemble, for one thing. Almost every performance he did that spring (the water tank, the “pit of snakes,” and Two Buddhas, to name a few) was photogenic. There were fewer failures. And yet there was also something less moving about these later works. Perhaps this is only because I know the story, but when I look at the simple portraits Tianming made of X, when he first discovered he was not the only young artist living in that village, they touched me in a way that those later collaborations did not.

  Were my cousin’s circumstances changing, or was he? That’s what I think he was wondering that day, as he sat smoking by the window. After the arrests, X might even have felt a kind of relief in breaking free of our little crowd. Yuchen finished medical school, and Lulu finally obtained her Hong Kong visa. I know that Cash opened up a DVD shop–cum– rock ’n’ roll bar, just outside the west gate of Qinghua University, and Baoyu (contrary to everyone’s expectations) got married and had a baby. After he was released from detention, my cousin finally had some peace in which to make his work. The question, of course, was whether he had gotten too accustomed to the attention, whether he would shut down when the microphones and cameras went away: Closed until further noticed.

  There were more dancers onstage now, circling their arms like so many skinny windmills. I had an urge to laugh, and suppressed it. The music was so loud that I didn’t notice Vice Principal Diller until she crouched next to my seat and laid a pale, veined hand on my arm. She whispered, so as not to interrupt the performance:

  “…small problem…put our heads together…”

  I must’ve been listening with my Chinese ear, because my first thought was literal: I didn’t want my head any closer to Vice Principal Diller’s than it already was.

  “…come with me…”

  “Is e
verything OK?” Cece asked, tearing her eyes away from the stage, where her daughter had stretched one leg high above her head and was holding her foot in her hand. The music had changed to something softer, involving flutes.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Yuan for a moment,” Vice Principal Diller said, more distinctly this time. (I noticed that no one asked her to be quiet.) “Please continue to enjoy the concert.”

  “Please stay here,” I told Cece, who nodded, transfixed by the dancing. The rest of the audience didn’t look up as I followed the vice principal out into the hallway. I blinked in the fluorescent light, but I was hardly surprised to be called out. I had been expecting it for months.

  “Perhaps it would be more comfortable in my office,” the vice principal suggested, and I agreed immediately. I found the empty hallway creepy; somewhere above us was the lonely sound of footsteps, and the music was faint through the thick auditorium walls.

  The vice principal’s office was oddly intimate. The only light came from a lamp on her desk, where a spectacular giant conch was prominently displayed. I thought there was something garish about that combination of colors, orange and doll house pink, as if a polluted sea had left a radioactive trace on the shell.

  “I’m sorry to take you away from the show,” the vice principal said, once we were seated. “But you see, there was no other choice.”

  I did not see. But I remembered what my old friend Fang had once told me: that if I were ever detained, the most important thing would be to avoid talking any more than necessary. No matter what they threatened, what documents or proofs they offered of my guilt, I was not to defend myself alone. Anything I said without a witness might be twisted into a kind of confession.

  “A group of parents has complained.”

  “We were talking during the performance,” I began, but I stopped when I saw the way Laurel Diller was looking at me. For a moment I had a strange fantasy: of myself as some kind of soft arthropod or mollusk, a bit of dumb muscle gummed to its glorious house, and of the vice principal as a shrewd collector, who wished to extract me from these spectacular lodgings.

  “The reason I was forced to remove you is unrelated to to night’s concert,” the vice principal said slowly, as if I might have trouble understanding her English. “Or rather, your presence aggravated a complaint I received from a parent last week. I had intended to complete my investigation before taking action, but you see—”

  I heard a burst of static from a walkie-talkie outside, and my heart began to thud. Had this whole nonsensical conversation been a stalling technique, to keep me here until the police arrived? I was terrified of the American police, and at the same time disgusted with myself. Didn’t I know people who had faced much worse with bravery, and even honor? I recalled the stoicism of my mother and grandfather in the 1960s, of my cousin in 1989, and even of Meiling in the spring of ’94. And yet, when the door opened, I whirled around and clutched the arm of my chair. It was only Willie the security guard, sticking his head into the office.

  “Beg pardon,” he said. “We’ve got a situation in the Malmstead Courtyard.”

  “Is the concert over?”

  Willie shook his head. “Five, ten minutes. I’m short-handed to night. No way are we getting it cleared up by then.”

  Vice Principal Diller was already up and out of her seat, motioning for me to accompany her; perhaps she didn’t want me out of her sight. We hurried toward the auditorium, Willie communicating by walkie-talkie with Maintenance in truncated language I couldn’t understand, but even before we reached the steps leading up to the garden—a concrete pavilion, with ornamental trees and a fountain containing oxidized green cranes, gift of the class of ’67—I knew we were too late. The audience had already exited the auditorium, and as we ascended the steps (at a jog), I could see the crowd pressed back against the building, staring up at the majestic purple jacaranda, which had undergone a strange transformation.

  In the hour and a half of the concert, the tree had blossomed. But what blossoms! Heavy, inverted flowers—ten, fifteen, twenty times the size of the ordinary blooms—weighing down the delicate branches and releasing a powerful odor. These appendages had been hastily attached with twine: you could see how the knots were strangling the fragile, pinnate leaves. Over the entire display, with loose folds to spare, a large net had been cast, as if the tree had been apprehended on its way to commit some crime. From the fountain the copper cranes took in the scene, frozen in stalk-legged wonder.

  There was a pop and a whistle: the crowd gasped as something small and black shot up in the dark, exploding over our heads. Three more fireworks followed, raining white sparks. The fireworks illuminated those pale and scaly flowers, as well as a small figure crouched beneath the tree. There was a familiar, fishy smell.

  “It reeks!” someone cried—there are always critics—but most of the audience simply stared, watching the performance unfold in front of them.

  For the first time, the vice principal seemed absolutely speechless. Perhaps because Willie had gone to apprehend the culprit, Laurel Diller turned to me.

  “What is that?” she asked, and I’m ashamed to admit that I answered without hesitation, implicating myself even further.

  “I believe it is a Sesquicenterpiece,” I said.

  69.

  BRIGHT LIGHTS FLOODED THE COURTYARD, AND THERE WERE NO MORE fireworks. The fish shivered and were still. Willie and his crew had surrounded the figure under the tree, and the curious crowd edged closer. But I did not need to see the artist in order to identify her.

  “Please wait for me in my office,” Vice Principal Diller said. She started to hand me a key from the ring at her belt, and then thought better of it. “The art studio will be more private,” she said. “Give me just a few minutes to clear this up.”

  I didn’t want to leave. They had taken June a kind of prisoner, and I wanted to argue. I was developing a half-mad plan to offer my ser vices, pleading the special influence I had with my prize pupil, when the Dance Directions girls streamed into the courtyard. They had heard the commotion, and (afraid of missing something) hurried from their dressing room in their makeup and tights. I turned and found two sets of eyes: Emily Alderman’s, and their exact replica, staring out from a gaunter, older version of her face. Mrs. Alderman put her arm around her daughter and said something I couldn’t make out.

  I left the courtyard then. I crossed the front lawn, climbed the stairs to the studio, and turned on the lights. My classroom was far enough from the Malmstead Courtyard that you couldn’t hear the din, and it was warm: St. Anselm’s excellent central heating intensified a complex aroma peculiar to art rooms all over the world: oils, newsprint, turpentine, dust, gesso, and glue. It was funny that I’d had to come all the way to Los Angeles in order to remember it.

  I was still thinking of those two pairs of eyes, and maybe that was what led me to the AP storage racks. I found Emily’s portfolio, sat down at my desk, and began removing the finished canvases one by one. June had said that Emily hadn’t destroyed those Color and Design paintings, and I meant to search the art room until I was sure they weren’t there. It wasn’t only curiosity; I had the feeling that what ever had happened to the paintings was connected, however obliquely, to my fate.

  I hardly thought I would find the missing paintings in Emily’s portfolio, and as I expected, there was nothing like the Mondrian-inspired acrylics. I remembered the disciplined excitement of those paintings, their formal (if slightly rigid) charm. They had convinced me of Emily Alderman’s aptitude and led me to expect something from her—an expectation she had not yet fulfilled. I went through landscape after landscape: well proportioned, in pleasing colors, and completely dead on the canvas. Why had Emily decided to destroy her best work?

  I was stacking each canvas facedown upon the frame of the last; I had got to the final painting, and was about to return them to the portfolio, when I noticed something very faint in the lower, left-hand corner. I turned over the canvas: it was
a winter landscape, a copse of delicate black trees in the snowy foreground, but underneath the snow was something unmistakably red, as if an animal had died there. I held the painting up to the light, and only then did I see the mark. It looked something like an umbrella, or a child’s drawing of a bird, a bird with a worm (or a fish) in its mouth.

  There was a rattling at the door, and I hurried to replace the canvases. I was expecting the vice principal, but thinking of my student, and so I was doubly startled when June walked into the room. She had dressed up for her performance in a sort of Scandinavian peasant dress, blue with red rickrack piping, on top of the same wine-colored corduroy trousers she’d been wearing the first day I met her. A red-and-purple silk scarf held her hair off her face, and she was wearing intricate copper wire earrings—if I wasn’t mistaken, homemade. I thought she’d never looked so pretty.

  “Yuan Laoshi!” she said, and then she laughed. She had a full and beautiful laugh, which she tried to hide by turning her head to the side. “I’m in trouble.”

  So am I, I wanted to tell her.

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked instead. I noticed that Willie was waiting for her outside the classroom.

  “I didn’t,” June said. “I’m supposed to get my stuff.”

  “Why do you need your stuff?” I asked, but June had noticed the paintings on my desk. She feigned casualness:

  “Why are you looking at Emily’s portfolio?”

  “How do you know it’s Emily’s?”

  “Emily’s theme is ‘The Seasons.’” June pointed to the winter landscape. “So of course those must be Emily’s.”

  “June,” I said sternly, “did you make these paintings?”

  “Those paintings? Are you serious?” June pretended to be shocked, but what ever her talents, she was not an actress.

  “Not these paintings,” I said. “You know what I mean.”