Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  “No need to waste time. Just put your threats in Liberation Daily and see what else I say–” He Luting’s glasses had slipped far down his nose. In response, the stranger wore a complacent smile. Sparrow hurried on.

  Further along the corridor, he arrived at the office he shared with Old Wu, a prodigy who played the erhu as if it were no more strenuous than clipping his toenails. He hadn’t seen Old Wu in weeks.

  On Sparrow’s desk was a note written in the margins of a scrap of newspaper: “Teacher Sparrow, thank you for lending me your copy of Musical Life of the Germans. I read it in a single sitting and couldn’t sleep all night. Shall I come by your office today, around one? Respectfully yours, Jiang Kai.” Sparrow reread the letter. At one this afternoon, Yin Chai would be performing Tchaikovsky in the auditorium to oceanic waves of applause. Kai must have forgotten.

  Sparrow slipped the note into his desk. The four ivory walls of the little room seemed to angle towards the window’s opening. He took out his Symphony No. 3, shoeprints and all, and laid the first movement across his desk. Try as he might, he could not smooth out the crumpled pages. He took up his pencil anyway.

  Time itself, the hours, minutes and seconds, the things they counted and the way they counted them, had sped up in the New China. He wanted to express this change, to write a symphony that inhabited both the modern and the old: the not yet and the nearly gone. The ticking in the first measures was a quote from Prokofiev’s whirring machines in Symphony No. 7, and in the foreground was a dance, allegro risoluto, quickening until the bars were rickety with steps, twisting free at last like a gunshot to the sky. A free fall into the second movement, a scherzo, a trio of violins that did not sound like themselves, withdrawing as winds and brass began a slow march. A sound gone just as it was learning to be heard.

  From the opposite wall, Chairman Mao gazed at him with a knowing smile. What have you ever written, Chairman Mao said chidingly, that is original? What can you possibly say that is worthy? Time passed and the paper grew warm in its patch of morning light. Three-quarters of Sparrow’s time was spent meeting quotas for the latest political campaign, and the other quarter teaching composition music theory. His own Symphony No. 1 had been performed, and well reviewed, only to be criticized by the Union of Composers. The symphony, they said, suffered from formalism and useless experimentation; the solemnity of the third movement did nothing to elevate the People; and the meaning, overall, was not immediately clear. If it hadn’t been for He Luting’s protection, the criticisms would have been far worse. Symphony No. 2, which he knew to be a work of great beauty, languished in his desk drawer, having never even been submitted for approval. Last month, he had set six poems of Wang Wei and Bertolt Brecht to music but these, Sparrow knew, were better left unheard. His students wanted revolutionary accessibility and his superiors tried to educate him on the correct political line, but what line could this be? As soon as he contained it in his hand, it opened its wings and filled the sky. What musical idea stayed fixed for a year or a lifetime, let alone a revolutionary age?

  He squeaked open his desk drawer and looked again at Kai’s confident handwriting. Like He Luting, Kai had come from the remote countryside, he was playful and virtuosic, possessed an extraordinary memory, and loved music as mysteriously, as confusedly, as Sparrow himself. But Kai was prepared to succeed. To be a renowned musician, one surely had to be already successful in one’s own mind; only musicians with this nature could rise above the others. Life, Sparrow felt, would have no choice but to be generous to Kai.

  He tried not to think of his own diminishing opportunities. He erased the last twenty measures he had written. For a long time, he sat, thinking, until the room itself became another room. On the empty page, a line came to him. The line moved forward along a steepening curve. He followed it, no longer conscious of the act of writing.

  —

  The morning passed. Sparrow was thinking of the letter from Wen the Dreamer and the mysterious Comrade Glass Eye when the door jumped open and Zhuli appeared, pale as an unlit candle. She was holding a green thermos, her violin case and a paper bag. “Cousin,” she said, “isn’t your stomach rumbling? I waited for you in Room 103, but you never came!”

  He had forgotten. She waved his apology away and grinned. In her old blue dress, Zhuli looked tired but also energized, older than her fourteen years. He got up and went to the little table laid with cups and dishes, picked out two that were the least tea-stained, and examined the package of pear syrup candies that Old Wu had received from an admirer, a girl nicknamed Biscuit. Old Wu had sampled one and abandoned the remainder.

  He poured tea and scattered a few candies on a plate. Zhuli was looking intently at the pages on his desk. She was humming the melody now. Lost in thought, she unlatched her violin case, lifted her violin and began to experiment with the phrasing.

  “Not yet, Zhuli.”

  She lowered her arm. “But Sparrow, listen to this. I can already hear how–”

  “The second movement isn’t even finished. I’ve barely begun it.”

  “Barely begun it? You’ve exhausted yourself on this symphony! Cousin, can’t you see it’s the most sublime thing you’ve ever written? I think you should show it to Conductor Lu right away. You trust him, don’t you?”

  There was a boisterous knock and the door opened again. Here was Kai, looking as if he had woken only minutes ago and run from Changsha to reach them. He was wearing a knock-off army cap and a rumpled shirt that was, comically, grass-stained. After greeting them, he immediately crossed the room. “What are you playing, Comrade Zhuli?”

  She frowned at him and smoothed her dress.

  “It’s nothing,” Sparrow said. “Just a few lazy thoughts of mine.” He gathered the sheets, Kai’s note and an essay he had been consulting, and cleared everything away. “Kai,” he said “if you hurry, you can still make it to Yin Chai’s recital. You won’t even be late.”

  “But aren’t we meeting? I left you a note.” His face, even his handsome cap, seemed to fall. Sparrow felt as if he had accidentally closed a piano lid on the young man’s fingers.

  “Teacher Sparrow is composing,” Zhuli said solemnly. “Have you eaten, Kai? Take these.”

  Sparrow watched the paper bag leap from one hand to the other. He felt old when he said, “Please don’t leave crumbs on Wu Li’s sofa.”

  Kai looked hungrily into the paper bag. “Old Wu? He’ll send his mother to clean them. Or maybe his grandmother.”

  His cousin let a laugh escape.

  They were so lighthearted, these two. Zhuli’s arms were bare but she seemed not to feel the breeze of the open window.

  Kai looked at him with a direct, unsettling frankness. “It would be good to go outside, stroll in the park and listen to the music of the People.” The sun warmed Sparrow’s hands. “Come, Teacher. You’ve been at work since dawn. And wasn’t it your birthday?”

  “He never celebrates,” Zhuli said. “He starves himself of joy. Luckily, joy seeps into all his compositions.”

  “Don’t either of you have lessons?” Sparrow said, trying to maintain his dignity.

  “All the pianists are downstairs, writing self-criticisms. I stayed up all night reading the book you lent me, and then I came at two in the morning to work on Mozart’s Concerto No. 9. It was just me and the stray dogs and the wind. Even the most stubborn old grandmas weren’t out lining up for meat.”

  “Up since 2 a.m.!” Zhuli said, clearly impressed.

  Sparrow tried to think of an escape route. He wanted to be alone with the window, the papers on his desk, and the freedom of his thoughts.

  “An hour,” Zhuli said. “Steal an hour from your life and give it to us.”

  She smiled at him, a smile as big and openhearted as Aunt Swirl’s when he was a child, and so he did.

  —

  In the park, Zhuli and the pianist walked on either side of him, as if afraid Sparrow would make a run for it. What do the sparrow and the swallow know, he though
t again, of the ways of swans? There was a swan, as it happened, in the shade of the pond, fluffing her grey-white wings, trying to appear larger and more deadly than she was. He heard the softness of her trilling.

  “The room I live in,” the pianist was saying, “is the size of one and a half men lying down. I have just enough space to turn over and back again.”

  Zhuli’s violin case swung as she walked. “How come you don’t board at the Conservatory? Maybe you prefer sleeping in a cave.”

  “I had to pull all sorts of strings to get this terrible room, but it’s near my stepfather. He was ill last year…anyway, the mice are good company.”

  Zhuli ducked under a low branch. “Be careful or the mice will multiply and take over the cat’s room.”

  When Kai laughed, his hair stood upright in the wind.

  Without Sparrow’s noticing the transition, Zhuli was telling the pianist about Ba Lute and the confrontation with the public security officers this morning. The pianist’s walk slowed. “What camp was your father at again?” he said.

  “I don’t know. But it’s in Gansu Province, isn’t it, cousin?”

  “I’m not sure, Zhuli.”

  She tensed. Faint perspiration gleamed on her forehead and her cheeks. She looked as if she could take on any campaign, criticism or family member, and leave them battered on the floor.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, cousin,” she said, her voice low. “I know when to keep my mouth shut. If only you could hear me in our political study class. I think I’ve memorized more slogans than the Premier himself.” She lifted her chin defiantly. Her recklessness, her casualness with words, stunned him. His cousin had been this way ever since Swirl’s return.

  But perhaps, he thought, this bravado was not for him but for Kai.

  The sun touched everything now. They attempted to find refuge on a bench under a flowering pear tree. They sat as if they were alone and self-contained, the joy of only a few minutes ago dissolving. Perhaps it was the heat that made them quiet. Nobody stood nearby yet Sparrow felt the weight of someone, or some attentive presence. There was shouting in the distance, or maybe laughing.

  “This morning,” Kai said, his voice barely audible, “the President of the Conservatory was in the newspapers. Did you read it? Liberation Daily has a full page on him. Wen Hui Bao, too. They say He Luting is anti-Party and anti-socialist, and that the most damaging accusations are coming from inside the Conservatory.”

  “I thought you were practising all morning,” Zhuli said.

  Kai paused. “I think that half my life might be spent running from one position to another until I trip and make a fatal mistake.”

  “Have you been to Wuhan?” Sparrow asked, wanting to change the subject. He knew He Luting was under investigation, of course, but Kai’s words still chilled him.

  “Forgive me, Teacher. I’m only a student and yet I feel that I can be very free with you. What did you ask me?”

  “Would you like to go to Wuhan?”

  “With you,” the pianist said.

  “Yes. If you have time to spare during the break. The journey and my research would need three or four days, perhaps longer. I’m looking for an assistant, I’ve been commissioned by the Conservatory to gather–”

  “Yes,” the pianist said.

  “But I haven’t told you why.”

  “I’ll go.”

  Zhuli was hugging her violin case to her chest as if it concealed her. She refused to be a child and demand to go with them. She had her mother to think of, too. One day soon, she thought, she would play for her father, whose face she no longer recalled, but who used to sing, “Little girl, where are you going? Tell your father and he will take you. Tell your father and he will find a map, bring the tea, make the sun lift, and string the trees along the road.” Was it a poem, a story, or something he had composed? “Zhuli,” he would say, “little dreamer.” She let go of his voice and heard Ravel, the song itself, and her shoes scratching the pebbles each time she shifted her weight. She could see the light and the park and her cousin and Kai, but these pictures were only tenuously connected to the sound of the violin in her head. She heard it on waking and she knew it continued relentlessly through her sleeping hours; she, herself, came and went, not truly real, but the music had no beginning, it persisted, whether she was there or not, awake or not, aware or sleeping. She had accepted it all her life, but lately, she had begun to wonder what purpose it served. Prokofiev, Bach and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation and Chairman Mao occupied for others. Why was this? How had she had been made differently? After her parents had been taken away from Bingpai, she had been cut into an entirely different person.

  There was a man limping across the park, one hand holding a rip in his shirt, as if this unsightliness bothered him more than the blood that ran down his face. People stared as he passed but no one spoke. Instead, a cold ring of quiet seemed to expand around this injured stranger, like water filling a plastic bag.

  —

  Zhuli walked back to the Conservatory alone. Her cousin and Jiang Kai had gone ahead, the two of them serious as Soviet spies, leaning towards one another, the pianist’s hand on the small of Sparrow’s back, the place, she knew, Sparrow had sustained an injury. He worked on his compositions for eighteen hours a day. Often, she came home from the Conservatory to find him lying on the floor of his closet room, in terrible pain. She would massage the spasms in his back and scold him for working too hard. It was as if Sparrow feared all the music inside him would be shut off, like a tap gone dry. But, honestly, who had ever heard of a Sparrow without music?

  Ahead of her, Kai turned, lifted one eyebrow and grinned at her. The pianist had the same open, honest smile as Premier Zhou Enlai. She imagined the coffin-sized room he lived in, the rough floors and rodents, and wondered how Kai had ever managed to learn piano if he had grown up in a destitute village outside of Changsha. What kind of strings could a village boy pull? The pianist was a bag of tricks, she concluded. He wore his rural background well, like a penny novel wrapped inside an elegant cover. When not smiling, though, he had a face that could only be described as vigilant.

  Her violin case swung with the rhythm of her steps. A procession of carts passed, each one weighed down with oil drums, the drivers sweating ferociously as if they were pedalling up Mount Ba itself. At the corner of Huaihai Road, she saw Conservatory students fluttering around Yin Chai, who had the glazed expression of someone who had withstood hours of adoration. The prettiest one, Biscuit, carried a trophy of flowers. Empress Biscuit detached herself from the group, came over, and overwhelmed Zhuli with revolutionary slogans, inside of which was posed, like a bee sting, the line, I saw you leaving with handsome Jiang Kai! Zhuli blinked and said, “The sun of Mao Zedong gives new fervour to my music!” and clutched her violin to her chest. Biscuit looked at her knowingly. The beauty queen would never be a great violinist, Zhuli thought, side-stepping Biscuit’s velvety hair which curled in long arabesques against the wind. She hid the moon and shamed the flowers, as the poets said, but she played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.

  She decided not to practise after all and ran abruptly into the road, hopping into a passing tram decorated with a banner that said, “Protect Chairman Mao!” It was so crowded, it squeezed even her envy out, so that when she entered the laneway off Beijing Road, she felt fine and light. Arriving home, she crossed the inner courtyard and entered the kitchen so unassertively that she caught her mother in the act of pocketing a spoon. Startled, Swirl turned. A handful of dried mung beans showered to the ground. Zhuli went to the table, clapped a mosquito between her hands and pretended she had witnessed nothing.

  “Ma,” she said, turning back, “I’m perfecting Ravel’s Tzigane. It’s incredibly difficult.”

  “Ravel,” her mother said, pleased.

  “Shall I play it for you soon?”

  “Yes, my girl.” Her mother smiled and a few more beans clicked and clacked on the tiled flo
or.

  Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday. She got a broom and quickly swept up the beans, rinsed them in the sink, and spread them to dry on a clean cloth.

  “Ma,” she said, but her mother was now at the kitchen table. Zhuli went to her, wanting to ask forgiveness for the disrespectful thoughts in her head, but then she noticed the two travelling bags on the floor, and the papers, maps and notebooks on the table.

  Zhuli picked up one of the notebooks, opened it and began to read. Her mother’s handwriting covered page after page: persistent, balanced, sharp. Zhuli recognized the story right away, Da-wei’s radio station in the desert, May Fourth’s journey into the western borderlands, and the great revolution that had overtaken their lives. The tantalizing, epic Book of Records.