New Year’s Eve, morning. Chen Qianli turned off from beside Chengchong Middle School onto Xuejiabang Road. Small vendors had set up a whole row of stalls along the wall, and Chen Qianli, like a man with nothing to do, stopped now and then to look around. Across from the gate of the Xiahai Temple, at the utility pole on the corner of Maohai Road, a burst of gong-clanging rang out—someone had brought out a monkey, which rolled and tumbled and jumped through hoops on the ground, and before long a crowd had gathered. He melted into the crowd, pushing left and right, and soon emerged from the other side, having shaken off whoever had been tailing him.

He went into a used-clothing shop and came out wearing a different hat—a gray felt bowler. That morning he had deliberately worn an eye-catching russet-brown hat and scarf. “Give them one conspicuous feature first, and their attention will fix on that.” His instructor had said this during training. He crossed the street beside the gate of Tilanqiao Prison and walked into a small road paved with broken granite chips.

On the north side of the road stood a row of red-brick buildings, dormer windows facing the sun on the rooftops. Thick smoke billowed along the street; a foreign old woman with a headscarf crouched by a coal-briquette stove, holding a palm-leaf fan. An old man pushed open a door and came out, clutching a wine bottle wrapped in old newspaper, a suspicious stain on his orange skullcap. He slunk out furtively, likely hoping to slip away, but the old woman caught sight of him at once and immediately began shouting.

Chen Qianli checked the house number and was about to go up the steps when the old woman suddenly stopped cursing and eyed him warily.

“I’m looking for Chen Qianyuan,” Chen Qianli told her.

“Attic room,” the old woman said abruptly, switching to Shanghainese.

Chen Qianyuan never expected that the person knocking and coming through his door would be his own older brother, still less that his brother would be the very comrade sent by the higher-ups to make contact, the one Old Yi had spoken of. This brother he had once lived with day and night had gone from thin to sturdy, with faint lines now at the corners of his eyes—at a glance, he seemed almost a different person.

Chen Qianli looked at his younger brother and asked, “Are Father and Mother well?”

Chen Qianyuan’s eyes grew moist. “They’re both fine. After you left, the organization moved them back to the countryside, to our hometown.”

“There are a lot of foreign residents living around here?”

“These past years, quite a few foreigners coming to Shanghai have settled in this area.”

“Mm. That’s something of a cover, at least.”

“But there’s no place in Shanghai now that’s completely safe.”

Chen Qianli was silent for a long while before finally letting out a long breath. “Nekrasov—do you still read him, these days?”

Chen Qianyuan was startled for a moment, then straightened up and recited a line: “They say the storm is coming, and I cannot help but smile.“

This was a signal the two of them had shared privately—for a time they had liked to use this line of poetry to affirm their youth and passion. Every time Chen Qianli came home late at night from his Russian-language cram class, they would exchange this password through the door. After Qianyuan moved into the dormitory at Chengchong Middle School, they would still do it every weekend when he came home. Each said half the line, whichever of them spoke first. No—Chen Qianli said to himself inwardly—it wasn’t a password for two people. It was for three. There was also Ye Tao.

They say the storm is coming, and I cannot help but smile. Of course he remembered this poem. He had once carefully copied it in brush calligraphy onto a sheet of Duoyunxuan stationery and given it to Ye Tao. The paper had a branch of peach blossom printed on it.

“Where did you go?” It was Qianyuan speaking.

The training school had originally been the estate of some old aristocratic family; standing at the edge of the grounds by the barbed wire and looking out, one saw an endless Siberian forest. Chen Qianli had lived there for three years.

Once winter came, after each day’s training exercises were finished, he passed the long nights with Nekrasov’s poetry. Sitting by the stove, reading aloud, reciting, or sitting in silent thought, until his mind filled with voices, until the figures of Ye Tao and his brother rose up from memory.

Chen Qianli felt a little dazed, his heart gone soft—a feeling he had not had in a long time. He restrained himself, slowly turning his thoughts to other matters. He looked around the room; it had been kept very clean, unlike what he remembered of Qianyuan—he remembered Qianyuan’s room always being a mess, but now the clothes hung neatly on the rack, and there was a red scarf there too. Was it his?

“That day you came back from Nanjing, you told me Sister Ye Tao had died a martyr’s death. You said you’d come back just to see me, to say a few words, and that you’d have to leave right away—that they were coming to arrest you.”

Because Chen Qianli knew they would say he had killed Ye Tao, that they would send the police to arrest him—they knew where he and his brother lived in Shanghai. In her final moment, Ye Tao had told him to go find the Party organization at once. It was the Party organization that had sent him back to Shanghai to find a certain person, and to carry a message to him. That person had told Chen Qianli: the organization had decided that he was to leave for the Soviet Union immediately. Later he learned who that person was—it was Comrade Shao Shan.

He had given his brother every bit of money he could find, telling him he was going away for a while, on a long journey, that someone would come to arrest him, and that his brother had better move the family out too, rent a room somewhere else.

“I went to the Soviet Union,” he said.

“The day after you left, people from the police station came. They said you’d killed someone in Nanjing, that you were a wanted Communist criminal, and they took away all your things. I wanted to get that book of poetry back—do you remember it? There was a portrait of Sister Ye Tao pressed inside it. A pencil sketch—all three of us were there when it was drawn. The man who drew it said he could capture a person with a single line, and make it look just like them—and it really did look just like her. They took the picture away. Everything connected to her disappeared, as if a person like that had never existed at all.”

“She did exist,” Chen Qianli said, smiling.

“But even now I don’t understand what really happened, why she died. You told me then it was because of her father. You said you’d settle the score with him one day.”

But Chen Qianli did not want to speak of this right now. He did not want to remember—perhaps the time to remember had not yet come.

“What about Old Fang? Did you see Old Fang? Was it he who told you to come find me?”

“Old Fang died a martyr’s death,” Chen Qianli said calmly. “His son was taken by the secret police too.”

Chen Qianyuan had just been about to put a book back on the shelf. It slipped from his hand and knocked over the teacup; Chen Qianli reached out and caught the book before it fell, setting it back on the shelf.

“Old Yi told me the news when we made contact. He learned of it through an inside source.” Chen Qianli did not tell his brother that he himself had been there at the time.

“There must be an enemy spy inside the Party organization,” Chen Qianyuan said, voicing his own conclusion.

“A temporary action group assembled in secret usually has a rather mixed membership,” Chen Qianli said, looking at his brother.

“So this person is among us?”

Chen Qianli was just about to speak—

Someone unlocked the door with a key. It was Dong Huiwen. She had never met this guest, and the guest had never met her either. But she recognized who he was—Qianyuan’s older brother. She could remember any face she had seen; she had studied his photograph countless times.

“This is Huiwen.”

Chen Qianli smiled at her. Chen Qianyuan told her that his brother was the comrade sent by the higher-ups to make contact with Yi Junnian. They shook hands. Her face was rounder than Ye Tao’s, and she was not as tall. She taught at a primary school—Chen Qianli recalled what Old Fang had once told him about her.

Dong Huiwen set an embroidered cloth bag on the table and took out gauze, medicated cotton, and ointment, cleaning Chen Qianyuan’s wound afresh, applying medicine, and then bandaging it with gauze, listening quietly all the while to the two brothers talk.

“They wanted to know who knew whom. That You Tianxiao—it seemed like he already knew all these comrades had been gathered together on short notice. Later they asked me whether Old Yi was the man sent by the higher-ups to convey the assignment. I thought, this is bad, something must have gone wrong on the inside. It’s lucky the secret police came in before the meeting even started. Fortunately someone jumped from the building to give warning. Do you know who that comrade who died was?”

Chen Qianli shook his head. There had been intelligence saying that the person who fell that day was a Chinese constable of the Concession police. From various pieces of information, Old Fang had judged him to be one of their own. Before he was hunted down by the enemy, Old Fang had reported this to his superiors, asking who this person was, which system he belonged to—but he had never gotten a reply. Perhaps the man had been under long-term deep cover on orders, known to very few. Perhaps he had lost contact with his superiors during a long period underground, his cell’s comrades martyred, the working line severed. Such things happened often enough.

The problem lay inside, Chen Qianyuan said again, as if to himself, still seemingly stunned by the force of this conclusion. Chen Qianli looked at his brother; when Old Fang had told him the list of people attending the meeting, he had already been somewhat taken aback. His memory of his brother had frozen at that summer—he had never imagined his brother would grow up too, still less that Qianyuan, like himself, would be forced to mature quickly under the brutal pressure of cruel struggle. Only now, face to face with him, did he realize that the year he had left Shanghai, he had been about the same age Qianyuan was now. Qianyuan was just as he himself had been then—seeing danger, facing danger, yet unable to truly comprehend it. How simple his own thinking had been back then.

“—we sent word to the organization, from inside the detention house.” It was Dong Huiwen speaking now, his brother’s girlfriend. Qianyuan really was just like him—the same age, a girlfriend the same age, both growing ever more fervent in the bitter cold. He listened quietly, and suddenly felt something was off.

“—Sister Ling said we absolutely had to report to the higher-ups.”

“Haohan?”

“Yes, that’s right. That fellow named You suddenly lost his temper, asking if I knew where Haohan was. Of course I knew who Haohan was. The enemy was hunting Comrade Haohan—that news had to be reported to the organization.”

“You’re saying your secret letter to Old Fang also mentioned Haohan?”

“Sister Ling wrote the letter. Time was very tight—Miss Tao was about to be released any moment, the guard was right outside the door, telling her to hurry and pack her things—and she really did have a great deal of stuff.

“Sister Ling decided to write the letter right away. We agreed we had to seize the chance to get the message out. Sister Ling understood these things—we’d already prepared rice-water for secret writing beforehand. The guard was pressing us from outside the door, so I pretended to help Miss Tao pack her clothes, trying to stall for time.

“I never got to read the letter, but Sister Ling said she wrote both the dice and the names in it.”

The enemy had switched the letter. Chen Qianli understood at once.

“When was this?”

“The day after the interrogation. Before I was called in for questioning, Miss Tao had already been called out by the guard. During my interrogation I heard a woman’s laughter outside the window—I think it was her voice. She got into a car and left. That night, the moment she came back into the cell she told us she’d be getting out soon.

“I think that’s when Sister Ling started scheming—she’s extremely decisive. From then on she kept talking with Miss Tao, and I could see she was trying to get close to her, so I helped too. Miss Tao wasn’t exactly respectable, but she had a strong sense of loyalty—she agreed that once she got out she’d help us pass a letter. All she had to do was mail it to a certain box, Sister Ling told her. That would be even easier, Miss Tao said.”

“Why did the military tribunal arrest her?”

“It seems she offended someone. She said it was a bank owner—might just be a bank president, but the backing behind him was terrifying. At first she wouldn’t say more, but Sister Ling pressed her, and finally she said the bank owner’s older brother was a high official in Nanjing, that even the Ministry of Finance was practically their family’s to run. She said the bank owner had taken a fancy to her, and she’d gotten involved with him, but then she wanted to marry him—she only meant to be a concubine, she said, but he absolutely refused.

“So then she tried to pressure him, said she was pregnant, said she’d expose the whole thing in the newspapers—so they had her locked up in the detention house. They just wanted to bring her to her senses, that’s what she said. She was let out very quickly after that.”

Dong Huiwen glanced at the calendar pasted on the wall by the table. “I remember she said happily that they’d let her out on a Saturday, and it was surely no coincidence, because that bank owner usually visited her on Sundays. So—it must have been the nineteenth of the twelfth lunar month.”

On the evening of the eighteenth day of the twelfth lunar month, the higher-ups had sent someone posing as a visitor to find him aboard the ship at Qingdao, telling him to detour through Shanghai to receive a new assignment. The visitor told him there was word that the captured comrades were about to be released.

That letter had been switched by the enemy, Chen Qianli thought—they had very likely stationed people around the post office box, hoping to catch whoever came to retrieve it, but had failed. They had altered the contents of the secret letter, which meant they did not want Old Fang to know the letter had mentioned Haohan.

Old Fang would have told the other comrades about the dice because that was the contact password—once the meeting began, everyone attending would recognize “Old Kai.” But why would the secret police be pressing these comrades for news about Comrade Haohan? Were the agents who went to the Fourth Road market the same batch who went to capture Haohan on Puensiji Road? Had they identified the man who fired a warning shot to alert Haohan on Puensiji Road as Old Fang? The information about Comrade Haohan was extremely important—he had to see “Old Kai” as soon as possible.

Just how many people knew the address of that barbershop? Did Cui Wentai know? He was a liaison, and Old Fang trusted him greatly; they met often, and secrets could slip out unintentionally in casual conversation. But if there was a problem with him, Old Fang might have been arrested long ago.

“What day did you all get out of the detention house?”

“Last Wednesday,” Chen Qianyuan answered.

“No, that’s wrong—the release day was Tuesday, the twenty-second of the twelfth month,” Dong Huiwen recalled carefully. “Sister Ling and I got out in the morning, you in the afternoon. Later Cui Wentai even drove over with medicine for your wounds—Liang Shichao told him you’d been tortured, badly hurt.”

Old Fang had died a martyr’s death, and only then had the enemy released them. Chen Qianli had a timeline forming in his mind; he turned over each event, sensing beneath every surface phenomenon the hidden intentions of the enemy. He fit these details into that timeline, trying to grasp his adversary’s intent.

“Have the two of you been in frequent contact these past few days?”

“We decided to set up a provisional Party branch—without having found the higher-ups yet, we’d organize ourselves first,” Chen Qianyuan told his brother.

“Whose suggestion was that?”

“Tian Fei said he’d already discussed it with Cui Wentai,” Chen Qianyuan said. “The day we were released, when he brought it up, we all agreed.”

“Who’s in the provisional Party branch?”

“Me, Huiwen, Sister Ling Wen, Old Yi, Tian Fei,” Chen Qianyuan counted off on his fingers, “Cui Wentai, Dr. Qin, and also Lin Shi and Liang Shichao.”

“That’s two more?”

“Who?”

“That day at the market, there were two others there too—didn’t they join the provisional branch?”

“One comrade we couldn’t reach. As for the other, Old Yi said he seemed a bit shaky—he was going to find time to talk with him.” Chen Qianyuan remembered something. “Sister Ling notified us last night that we’re holding a meeting of the provisional Party branch today. Now that the higher-ups have sent you—will you come, to tell everyone what to do next?”

“When?”

“Tonight, seven o’clock.”

Chen Qianli recalled what Wei Dafu had said: “I heard the comrades are somewhat anxious—something happened at the clinic?”

“They’ve got Lin Shi under control,” Chen Qianyuan said, turning to Dong Huiwen. “You tell him. Sister Ling told Huiwen about the meeting, and mentioned what happened at the clinic while she was at it. Old Yi said this meeting absolutely has to happen.”

“Where’s the meeting being held?”

“Right at the clinic,” Dong Huiwen said. “That’s safe. Sister Ling said the front room above the passage-building is the consulting room—a whole row of windows, excellent sightlines, you can see anything happening on the street. The front and back buildings are well hidden, both have back doors, and there’s a rooftop terrace up top—plenty of escape routes.”

“Have you been there?”

“I went with Qianyuan. Dr. Qin looked at his wound and gave him a prescription.”

Chen Qianli pressed further: “Did Sister Ling say who was involved in seizing Lin Shi and interrogating him?”

“Sister Ling said Tian Fei from the library was the most rash. Sister Ling happened to go to the clinic that morning—”

“What did she go there for?”

“I don’t know, she didn’t say—maybe she wanted to check on the wounded comrade. She saw Dr. Qin with a worried look, that’s what she said, a worried look. When she heard what was happening, she said, let her handle it. That’s just the kind of person Sister Ling is, everything goes through her. She went over and stopped them—said you can’t do that, you can’t just suspect a comrade like that on a whim. That fellow Tian—”

“Tian Fei,” Chen Qianli reminded her.

“Right, Tian Fei. Sister Ling said he was the most rash, absolutely refusing to let Lin Shi go—”

“Let him go?”

“They had Lin Shi tied to a chair.”

Anxiety and suspicion were one thing; a bank safety-deposit box was quite another. Chen Qianli realized that along that timeline in his head, the enemy had run faster than he had. He had to think of a way, and quickly. He guessed the enemy had likely already been watching the clinic—there might well be a great many agents lying in wait around it.

He had a vague sense that someone was watching him too. The enemy had not truly released these comrades—they had only moved them from a visible prison into an invisible one. This invisible prison was more dangerous than the Longhua detention house—the enemy outside was hard enough to see clearly, but the enemy within was even harder to distinguish.

Dong Huiwen went downstairs to cook rice-flour dumplings. Chen Qianli picked up the stack of manuscript pages on the table.

“I’ve been practicing translation,” Chen Qianyuan said.

On the first page of the manuscript, written in pen, was the title: The First Letter, the First Phase of the First Revolution.

“A Letter From Afar?“

This was the earliest Russian work Chen Qianli had ever read. From the Russian cram class. A mimeographed journal with yellowed pages. He had brought it to his teacher, Ye Qinian.

Back then, he ran to Xinzha Road every day, where Ye Qinian lived. A lane house—downstairs was a magazine office, and at night the Esperanto study group also held its meetings there.

Back then, Teacher Ye had still been a scholar, a believer in anarchism. Back then, he had worshipped Teacher Ye—Teacher Ye had been a star figure, eloquent, brimming with passion. His home was always full of distinguished guests, and he had always been fond of Chen Qianli. Back then, Ye Tao would sometimes come downstairs and sit quietly listening off to the side.

He had brought A Letter From Afar to Teacher Ye, excited to show him, never expecting it would mark the beginning of the rift between him and his teacher. Don’t bother with those Russian books, they’re useless—the world of the future will have only one language. Such disagreements gradually multiplied.

Later, even his going upstairs to Ye Tao’s chamber became a problem. Teacher Ye first put on a stern face and quietly told him: the two of you aren’t children anymore, stop running over to her all the time. Then he began scolding Ye Tao instead, and later still, he announced to him that he was never to set foot in this house on Xinzha Road again. But only a few days later, Ye Tao came to see him anyway.

He and Teacher Ye had drifted ever further apart. Back then he could never quite tell—he always assumed the change in Teacher Ye came from some obsessive feeling, a father refusing to let him get close to his own daughter.