Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  “You’re making a new copy,” Zhuli said. “Ma?”

  “I finally finished it this morning.”

  Her mother drew a widening circle on the biggest map. “Your father’s camp was here,” Swirl said, “but if he returned to Gansu Province I think he would avoid this region…”

  Zhuli could not follow her mother’s trajectories. They criss-crossed and overran one another like the interlacing of a bird’s nest.

  “So I should begin my search here,” her mother concluded. And her fingertip came to rest on an open place.

  Zhuli wanted to take her mother’s frail hand, lift it off the map, and hide it in her own. She wanted to take the map and burn it in the stove. “How would you do that?” she said quietly.

  “Your aunt and I will go together. We travelled the length of this country when we were young.”

  “It’s not the same as it was.”

  “True. Back then, there was the war against Japan, famine, and then the Nationalists bombed the Yellow River and terrible flooding came…”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Zhuli said. “The neighbourhood grandmas will talk and the public security men will break down the door again. They’ll say you’re siding with a convicted rightist. And then what?” She wanted to say, but did not, How can you even think of leaving me again? Don’t I matter? Isn’t there any part of you for me and not for him?

  “Big Mother will be teaching a new model opera in Gansu Province,” Swirl said. “Since she’s leader of the Song and Dance Troupe, she arranged for me to accompany her. She already told the neighbours she’s going to handle my resurrection back into society. She told them that once I had lived in a Gansu mud hut for a few weeks, I would overcome the wrongs I committed and the idiocies of my youth.”

  Her mother reached out, hesitantly, to touch the long ends of Zhuli’s hair. Her eyes were forthright and calm. “Foolish girl,” she said softly, teasingly. “I’ve already been to the sea and back. This is only a small journey.” Her mother’s grey shirt and pants were ironed and clean, proper and unassuming, but there was a look in her mother’s eyes that had nothing to do with propriety and obedience. There was no resignation, only a sharp knife in a pool of water. Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

  “Ma,” Zhuli said, “please let me go with you.” Even as she said it, she knew she didn’t want to leave. “Big Mother can arrange it, can’t she?”

  Her mother said nothing as if the thought itself was not worth hearing.

  Instead, Swirl picked up the copy she had made of Chapter 17 of the Da-wei novel and began to ramble like the evening newsreader. She would make further copies of all the chapters, she said, each one bound into a separate notebook, thirty-one notebooks in all. But in each one, the text would be marginally altered, and the date of copying added. They would use the same code as the original author, folding locations and information into the names of Da-wei and May Fourth, clues meant only for Zhuli’s father, changes he would recognize immediately as not belonging to the original Book of Records.

  “But what location?” Zhuli asked. “It’s too dangerous for him to come here.”

  Her mother had thought of everything. The location belonged to a third party, the Lady Dostoevsky, who had been resurrected by the Party and was now living in Gansu Province, working for a plant and flower clinic.

  “She has given the clinic a wondrous name,” her mother said. “She calls it Notes from the Underground. The idea suddenly came to me. I remembered how Da-wei sent messages to his lover over the radio broadcasts, through the public airwaves. Hiding in plain sight. Big Mother and I will keep making copies as we go, and we’ll scatter them all over the Northwest. She’s already used the Conservatory’s machine to make a dozen copies of Chapter 17, your father’s favourite chapter. Wen might go without food for five days, but he can’t resist the literature section of the bookshops. We added the date, you see? As soon as your father sees it, he’ll know the message wasn’t left by the author. The message could only have come from us.”

  Zhuli put her arms around her mother. Her mother hugged her back but her arms were light as wings.

  “When do you leave, Ma?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  She gripped her mother tighter. She remembered the little house they’d had in Bingpai, and the hidden, underground cavern, filled with books and musical instruments. She had climbed down into it as if into a magic kingdom and, in doing so, altered her parents’ lives forever. Did such caverns still exist, she wondered. If she found another, would she enter it again?

  Her mother’s eyes flashed an unnerving light, part anger, part madness, part love. “Zhuli, be careful what you say and whom you trust. No one is immune. Everyone thinks that with one betrayal they can save themselves and everyone they love.” She looked down at the map again as if it, and not this room, this city, was the real world. “Think only of your studies. Don’t write to me, don’t be distracted. Promise me you won’t take any risks. Concentrate on your music.”

  —

  As Zhuli was on her way out again, Big Mother Knife was in the midst of winnowing through clothes, dried fruit, sewing needles, sleeping mats, various washcloths, a cooking pot and a collection of knives, trying to fit them into Ba Lute’s army rucksacks. “I’d rather have this cleaver than this pair of trousers,” Big Mother said thoughtfully, holding both items up for display.

  “I’d rather you had the trousers,” Swirl said. “Come, tuck the cleaver into my quilt…”

  Big Mother started singing a verse from “How the North Wind Blows,” interspersing bawdy words, and Swirl laughed and said, “Cover your ears, Zhuli!”

  “Or add your own verse!” her aunt said, and the two sisters giggled and folded the clothing into smaller and smaller squares.

  Da Shan had come home from school and was lying on the sofa with Chairman Mao’s guerrilla warfare essays on his stomach. “Take me with you,” he said. “I’ll be your pack horse.”

  “If I gave you two grapes,” his mother said scornfully, “it would break your back.”

  Da Shan sighed. “Why so hard, Mama?” he said and Big Mother turned, the trousers dangling from her fingertips. Her face softened and Da Shan sat up, took the trousers, folded them and rolled them up and handed them back to her. “You’ll need these, Mama,” he said, and smiled.

  —

  Zhuli clutched her violin and turned in the direction of the Conservatory. The spring sky was a haze of pink and grey. She walked slowly, listening to the scores in her bag rustling like kept creatures, wondering if Kai would come to see her in Room 103, or if instead she would find Yin Chai and Her Royal Biscuit huddled indecently together. Apparently Biscuit and Old Wu had broken up. But maybe, if she was lucky, the practice rooms would be completely still. Once or twice now, she’d had nightmares of standing up on stage before a thousand people, the eternally sleepless faces of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi gazing down on her from the walls, but when she set bow to strings, the first notes of Tzigane refused to sound. The audience grew restless. They laughed as she tried to restring her violin, jeered as she replaced her bow, deafened her with abuse, but no matter what she did, her violin would not play.

  “Stage fright,” Sparrow had told her. “It’s normal to feel anxiety.” The Conservatory had set the date for Zhuli’s next solo concert, mid-October, a few days after her fifteenth birthday. She had wanted to play Bach or her beloved Prokofiev, but Teacher Tan would not hear of it. He wanted her to aim for the next Tchaikovsky Competition, four years away. “The Ravel is a better preparation, unless you prefer Paganini’s Caprice No. 24.”

  “I’m the daughter of a convicted rightist, Teacher. I won’t be allowed to compete abroad.”

  His eyes gave nothing away. “We must have faith in the Party. And you, too, must do your part.”

  But two nights ago, Kai had told her that some, if not all,
of these opportunities–competitions, scholarships–would be withdrawn. The Conservatory had been unusually quiet that night. It had been so hot, perhaps everyone had fled. “One day soon,” Kai joked, “we’ll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked.” His next solo concert had also been scheduled for October.

  “If it weren’t for Ba Lute, they would never have accepted me into the Conservatory at all,” she said. “I fully expect to be transferred to an agricultural college in Shandong Province.”

  “All the more reason to try to go abroad.”

  She played a few measures of the Ravel. “Your father is a Party member, of course.”

  “A pure seed of the earth. A peasant who played the bamboo flute and joined the Revolution so early, even our Great Helmsman didn’t know there was one.”

  He liked to shock her. She refused to laugh. “I don’t believe anything you say, Kai.”

  He took her hand and held it. “I’m glad, Zhuli. Never trust me.” He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to her cheek and then to her lips. The warmth of his mouth humiliated her, she turned her face but he kept holding on to her hand, the heat of his breath against her ear. Just at the moment when she wanted to give in, to kiss him fiercely, he had released her fingers. “Do what the old violinist says,” Kai told her. He continued as if nothing unusual had occurred. “Play the Ravel. I can do the accompaniment, if you wish.”

  “Fine,” she said. She was trembling. He had switched gears as smoothly as a bird circling, as unequivocally as a madman. “Since you like it so much.”

  When he left, she had picked up her violin again. How had he dared? But a giddy, shameful pleasure had swelled inside her. Why had she allowed him?

  Now she reached the stone gates of the Conservatory where hundreds of students were milling about the courtyard, reminding her of a fire crackling. Zhuli went straight to her political study class, she was nearly an hour early but still she was the last to take her seat. One of her classmates, wearing a crimson armband, made a show of taking down her name. The girl, also a violinist, was sincerely single-minded. Last summer, she had been one of the students sent out to the countryside. He Luting had refused to stop classes, and so only a limited number, the children of cadres, had been permitted to go. Most of them, including Kai, had lived in the barest shelters. Some of them had clearly never touched dirt before but, still, they came back as heroes.

  Back at the Conservatory, they showed their newfound knowledge by continuously questioning their teachers, their parents and music itself. “We must take responsibility for our minds!” this girl had proclaimed. “To change our consciousness, we must change our conditions!” The teacher was barred from the room. Zhuli and her classmates wrote essays on discarded newspapers and butcher paper and pasted them up on the north wall. “Are we gifted?” the essays asked. “If so, who cares?” “What good is this music, these empty enchantments, that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?” “If it is beauty against ugliness, then choose ugliness!” “Comrades, the Revolution depends on us!”

  Now the class turned their attention to the playwright, Wu, and the poet, Guo. Both men, once celebrated, had been discovered to be enemies of the People.

  “Guo claims he hasn’t studied Mao Zedong thought properly, he says we should burn all his books, he claims he is reformed but we know him, Comrades, don’t we? The snake lies. How long has he been a Party member? How long has he been a hidden traitor?”

  “And yet the authorities do nothing!”

  “We women must be at the forefront of violent class struggle, we must make it our nature. Nobody can struggle for you. Nobody can wash your face for you! Revolution is not just writing an essay or playing ‘Song of the Guerrillas’…”

  “Exactly, the older generation used the Revolution to protect their status. They’ve betrayed us.”

  The students began offering criticisms of themselves and each other, and the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favouring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!” Had she been critical enough, too critical? Their faces, their gestures, their eyes were cold. They knew that, in the moment of speaking, she believed what she said, but as soon as class ended, clarity fell apart. All her thoughts kept intruding on each other.

  By the end of the study session, her hands sat on her knees like stones. Standing, she could feel her dress glued with sweat to her back and legs. Embarrassed, she sat down again, dropped her eyes and busied herself with her books.

  After the class had disbanded, she wandered up one hallway and down the other, arriving at Room 103 as if at the home of a confidant. She found Kai there with her cousin. Sparrow was leaning against the far wall and when he lifted his rapt face and smiled at her, she thought his eyes had the saddest light. Kai grinned at her. She closed the door behind her and felt as if she had stepped into outer space. Bach’s Goldberg Variation No. 21 gave way to a joyous, bold and imperious No. 22. Kai played as if he were juggling a dozen silver knives, and all the edges flickered and shone.

  Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart. Maybe, like Sparrow, Kai was terrified that one day the sound would shut off, his mind would go mute, and all the notes would disappear. Dear Kai. Ah, she thought, quickly correcting herself, the word “dear” was stupid with sentimentality and had been struck from permissible usage. What should she call him then? Her eyes threatened to fill. Jiang Kai was so much like her and yet…in the dramatic flashing of his hands, he played every note as if it belonged to him alone. He was all capriciousness and beauty and sophisticated performance; she thought he would be better suited to the hot-headed genius of Beethoven or Rachmaninoff or even the modernist high-rises of Stravinsky. Bach, she’d always thought, was a coded man, a strange fish, a composer who loved God and devoted himself to the numeric order of the world, but whose heart was fragmented. He existed outside of time. One day, Kai would play Bach with all the ardour that the composer called forth, but not yet. Kai was still too young, too certain.

  At her insistence, Sparrow played the first movement of his unfinished Symphony No. 3 while she and Kai leaned against the wall. The opening slid from the key of E-flat major to an unexpectedly luminous B minor. She heard atonality etched into a falsely harmonious surface, she heard brittle ruptures and time speeding up like a wheel spinning ever faster. For all her talent, and for all of Kai’s, it was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift. His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

  While others in the Conservatory gave poetic names to their work (“Young Soldier’s Joy” or “Thirty Miles to the Courier Station”) Sparrow, as usual, gave only a number. Yet Zhuli imagined she could hear her father’s presence in the music just as clearly as if Wen the Dreamer’s name was written on the page. Could his name be written there in secret? Bach, for instance, had encrypted the four letters of his name into a single motif. These four notes, where in the German system B is B-flat and H is B-natural, served as his signature, surfacing through the music. And hadn’t Schumann encoded the town where his lover was born? It would be just like her cousin to speak without speaking. Zhuli’s left hand was playing an invisible violin, and when she noticed herself doing this, she abruptly stopped. Still, she heard a recurring pattern inside Sparrow’s new work, as if they were the very footsteps of Wen the Dreamer. At night, her father walked across her own dreams, too. Since escaping the camp, where
could he possibly hide? Last month, Zhuli had overheard her mother saying that the bodies of those who died in the desert camps were left to decompose in the sand dunes. Scientists and teachers, longtime Party members, doctors, soldiers, paper-pushers and engineers, more than enough to build a better China in the underworld.

  “Careful. Even ghosts are illegal here,” Big Mother had said.

  “The lie is too big. I can’t pretend, I don’t wish to.”

  Big Mother Knife said that another purge was coming, there were rumours in her unit.

  “I’m a stupid fool,” Swirl said. “I was a fool.”

  In what way had she been a fool, Zhuli wondered. What did she mean?

  Big Mother had dissolved the melancholy with a long, rumbling burp. “If you can’t pretend to be a Communist, the only answer is–”

  Abruptly, Sparrow stopped playing. “It’s unfinished,” he said. “I can’t go on.”

  “But it’s extraordinary,” Kai exclaimed. “It’s your masterpiece.”

  Blushing, Sparrow handed Zhuli her violin. “It’s nothing,” he said.

  To banish the awkwardness in the room, she chose Ysaye’s sonata in the dubious E minor key. She envied the composer’s intellect, the observant compassion that Sparrow possessed, and wished to cultivate it within herself, but it was impossible. She was a performer, a transparent glass giving shape to water, nothing more than a glass. When the sonata ended, Kai leaped up and rushed from the room. “Some people really don’t like E minor,” Zhuli murmured.

  “Perhaps he has an assignation.”

  It was late, almost midnight. “I don’t think that our pianist has a lover.”

  Sparrow looked faint.

  To bring the colour back to his face, she reminded him that his mother and hers were packing their bags, they were leaving for the hinterlands of Gansu. “It’s better for Aunt Swirl. Shanghai is uneasy right now,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer. Zhuli wanted to ask him about fear because this unease inside of her, it too was a kind of desertification, a kind of hunger, and where would it end? It was cutting a fault line, running all the way to her hands.