Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  Jian closed both eyes and seemed to hold his breath, then he opened them, looking directly at Sparrow. “When I finally looked into the mirror, I saw myself, as if for the first time, as a human being like any other. It is just an eye, such a small thing, but…” He turned towards the very thin man. “I think it’s almost time for a new eye, Comrade.”

  Comrade Glass Eye assessed the violinist’s face. “As we get older,” he said, “the colour of the iris fades. So perhaps you are right, and the colour could come down a degree.”

  “So you see,” said Jian, “we two are like brothers.”

  On the long table, Sparrow took in a delicate set of glass tubes, a Bunsen burner, miniature jars of paint and slender paintbrushes that seemed to have only a single hair.

  “I have a spare room,” Comrade Glass Eye said, “just through here, if you, my friends, wish to stay a few nights with me. It is a simple but welcoming place.” Under the electric lamps, both of the man’s eyes seemed like painted objects, peculiar, shining with a mystery of their own. Before Sparrow could answer, Kai said, “We would be glad to, Teacher.” The thin man clapped his hands, making them all jump. “And you, Old Jian? Come and keep an old fool company.”

  “I brought my violin,” Jian said. “And young Sparrow plays the erhu.”

  “Then you must come and see my musical instruments. If you follow me this way…”

  —

  That night, it stormed. As Sparrow played for them, the tap-tap of rain needles percolated into the music, interfering with the notes, muffling some and enlarging others, as if the downpour had a mind of its own and conducted the entire field of sound within and without the two-gabled house. Comrade Glass Eye served a muddy, sweetened coffee that he said came from the Buddhist lands of the southern seas, followed by a rice wine Jian said came from the western borders of Turkmenistan. In the corner of the room was a small harpsichord, so thin and earth-toned that Sparrow had not even realized it was there. He lifted the cover, revealing a Latin inscription.

  “Music,” Comrade Glass Eye translated, “is a solace of great labours. So, young man,” he said, turning to Kai, “won’t you play for us? Teacher Sparrow has told us that you are a divine pianist.”

  Kai tried to say he was merely ordinary but they would not hear of it. Finally, he sat down on the rickety wooden bench. He began to play a Bach cantata transcribed for keyboard, the “Actus Tragicus.” Sparrow had the feeling of descending a sunlit staircase. The libretto rose up to meet him: “Ah, Lord! Teach us to think that we might die so that we might become wise. Put your house in order, my child, for you will die and no longer remain among the living.”

  The priests in Kai’s village must have owned a harpsichord, for the pianist played it as if it were his own. He ingeniously folded the music in half and then half again, emerging at the third movement with a chorus unexpectedly rapt with joy: Today, today, you will be with me in Paradise. And from this height, a place best described as kǔ lè, a state containing both joy and sorrow, the music began to tumble down, suddenly blending into Sparrow’s own unfinished Symphony No. 3. Kai had only heard it the one time but now he played it from memory. The transition astonished Sparrow. The notes simultaneously faltered and climbed, faltered and lifted. The music seemed cast in an unknown and unimagined hue, so that Sparrow felt as if he were hearing his own composition for the first time.

  When the movement ended, Comrade Glass Eye shook his head. “But what music is this, that reminds me of things I once knew?” He began, drunkenly, to remember the camps of the Northwest. “Was it so much to ask,” he said, “to be allowed to live one’s own life, honouring one’s parents and raising one’s children to the best of one’s ability? Why is so simple a life the most difficult to obtain?” The portraits of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao assessed them like busybody neighbours. “Poor Teacher Edison!” cried Jian, leaping to his feet. Sparrow feared the walls were listening and he wanted to say it was only music but could not bring himself to voice words so patently untrue. Kai paused to let the audience settle. The pianist gulped down a full glass of the Turkmenistan wine, and caught Sparrow’s eye with a sad, helpless smile. He began playing again as the rain fell harder, sweeping them all away from Wuhan, from the county, the province and even the earth itself until everything swayed including the tremor of Kai’s music. They focused exclusively on the sixth and seventh bottles, and Sparrow experienced a delirious freedom of thought and freedom of movement. The doors exhaled and covers of beds swept open to welcome them and Sparrow listened to the deluge while Kai held him clumsily in his arms. “How could you play my symphony so perfectly?” he asked. Kai answered, “How could you think I would forget it?” They fell asleep this way, touching without fully touching, near and far away, satiated and yet full of yearning.

  —

  Sparrow was the first to wake. He heard the rattle of a truck on the broken road outside and became aware of Kai slowly falling off the narrow bed. Gently, he pulled the unconscious pianist back onto the mat and covered him. The young man murmured in his sleep and said, “Dear Sparrow,” and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness. He lay quietly, the wine now aching in his head, and listened to a noise from outside, the sharp note of a spade tapping stone. He pulled on his clothes and went out. In the dusty garden patch, Comrade Glass Eye was on his knees, occupied by something just emerging from the ground.

  “He arrives,” Comrade Glass Eye said, addressing the plants, “the nephew of Wen the Dreamer. A renowned composer as if from another time and age.” Aided by Sparrow, he slowly got to his feet. “Let me show you the furnace our village built during the Great Leap Forward. A model of ingenuity,” he said frowning.

  They began to walk away from the house, sloping down a hill towards a line of softly whistling trees. Sparrow saw the smelter Comrade Glass Eye had spoken of, a misshapen black hat rising up from the dirt, abandoned.

  “There it is! May it stand for eternity!” Comrade Glass Eye said, nearly shouting. Then his voice dropped low. “A rumour says that Wen the Dreamer is no longer at the camp.”

  Sparrow nodded.

  “If you’ve come all this way to inquire after him,” the older man said, “I know nothing of his whereabouts. I am very sorry.” They were not moving quickly. Comrade Glass Eye favoured the right side of his body, and his forehead shone with the effort of hiding his physical pain. It seemed clear to Sparrow that the inventor was gravely ill.

  “Teacher, let’s stop here to rest.”

  “No need, no need.” And then, even more softly: “I’ll feel better away from the house. There are spies everywhere. I’m afraid I was rather foolish with my words last night.”

  Sparrow nodded. He turned to look back, half expecting the doors and windows to have tottered after them.

  “Wen the Dreamer had a suitcase,” Comrade Glass Eye said, after they had been walking for some time. “A very important suitcase. It held a clean set of clothes, a picture of his wife and their little girl, what was her name…”

  “Zhuli,” Sparrow said.

  “Of course. Zhuli.”

  “I received a letter from him.”

  The old man seemed not to hear. His eyes were glassy in the sun, and then they were suddenly wet. Tears fell and mixed with the man’s sweat, and only then did Sparrow know that Comrade Glass Eye had understood. “Our friend is not only a fine calligrapher,” the man whispered, “but an escape artist of the highest rank. Where does a person hide in the desert? It’s like a fish trying to hide in a tree!” He stopped to turn away, lifting his hands to his face. He said, from behind this shelter, “I’ve seen men leave this world midway through a sentence. If I tell you what we lived through, would you believe me?” His hands descended. “If I told you that, all through the bitter winter, we lived inside caves, what would you say? That good men, educated and honest men, had to copy the ways of animals in order to survive the climate, but we were not animals! We were missing sharp teeth and
pointed ears and thick fur coats! We and all our men starved…Comrade Sparrow, I’m going to tell you the truth about these camps. I’m a very old man and if it turns out you’re a spy, I’ve nothing to lose but myself. I can’t betray Wen because I’ve no idea where he’s gone. I only hope he took the suitcase with him.”

  “I promise you,” Sparrow said. “I’ll keep all our secrets.”

  The old man nodded. He was already half-submerged in his own memories.

  “The year I met Wen the Dreamer,” Comrade Glass Eye said, “there was famine everywhere. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, the true face of our Revolution was revealed. Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steelmaker? How did they imagine that a boy who had studied the fields all his life could make iron ore out of nothing? I think it is much more serious than ideology, production and material needs. We had to become only what they proclaimed us to be, we existed to be forged and re-forged by the Party. Here in this village, the communal kitchen was shut down for lack of food. The ground and the trees were stripped bare. Nobody had a pot to cook their soup in, let alone soup itself. In six months, half the people starved, first the children and the old, and then the rest.

  “It is a pitiful death, this useless wasting away, and it was a silent famine because few in the city knew what was happening in the countryside. All they knew was that food enough was coming in through the proper channels. All the grain had been requisitioned, you see, they took it away and left the countryside with nothing.” He nodded his head, and turned his face to the undulating line of land and air, to the grey mountains in the distance. “In the Northwest, our own famine was a catastrophe. We had no ceremonies. What can the Party say at the funeral of a convicted rightist? To them, he had already died long ago.

  “But I was fortunate in my gifts. If I may say so, hunger inspired my most ingenious creations! Over time, your uncle became my tall and trusted assistant. Wen the Dreamer and I made pulleys and tools out of nothing more than the desert wind. Every storehouse can be broken into–every camp administrator’s private quarters, every cook’s kitchen–if you have the right hands and the right tools. Dreaming Wen could reach the highest windows, he could stretch like an expanding ladder. We had a motto, Brother Wen and I, not to waste anything in the wastelands. We ingested compost, animal feed, we welcomed any nutrient under the sun. From the Party to our stomachs! From the sun of Chairman Mao to our lips! We promised ourselves that we would seek out the last edible crumb on this empty plate and find a way to eat the plate itself, if necessary. There would be no slow death for us, only a slow regeneration. Every day we woke up and cursed our leaders, the Revolution and history, and we worshipped life, learning and the future.

  “Do you know why I was sentenced to re-education through labour, Young Sparrow?” He smiled, as if he was about to tell a long and satisfying joke. “Let me digress and offer you this tale within a tale. Well, my crime begins with my mother. During the civil war, she left my father and ran away with a Nationalist soldier, a fighter for Chiang Kai-shek. My father, it must be said, was not the easiest man. He used to fall asleep wearing his own shorts on his head to keep out the cold, and when he woke in the morning, he would forget they were there, and go out into the village just as he had gone to sleep. My mother, meanwhile, was the brightest star in the village, intelligent, kind and lovely, and twenty years younger than him. Her Nationalist lover was, in fact, a childhood friend. Just as the civil war was breathing its last, he crept back to the village under cover of night. They disappeared together. Chairman Mao was all but leader by then. My father feared my mother would be caught, charged with sedition and executed. He couldn’t sleep and became so worried that he wasted away, as if he, himself, was on the run. But, one morning, a letter arrived from my mother. She told us she had followed her lover and General Chiang Kai-shek out of the country and into exile in Taiwan. And so, she was gone forever.

  “I knew my mother loved me as much as she loved her sweetheart; thus she would never be happy separated from him or me. One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My mother only wrote to me the once; I never heard from her again. But I kept that letter all my teenaged years and I felt her suffering and believed that she felt mine. We were connected, as surely as this blade of grass is attached to the soil below.

  “My father’s love for her, meanwhile, was set to flow evermore towards her, no matter where she went or what she did, and it burned brightly until the end of his brief and patient life.

  “Anyhow, by 1955 I was a bachelor and an orphan, and the Chairman chose this moment to launch his brightest campaign. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ he told us. ‘Let a hundred schools of thought contend!’ We were told we must question ourselves, our superiors, and the state of our nation so as to make a country that was both unified and just. Young Sparrow, I had spent too long in my workshop, alone with my crystal radios, homemade batteries and amplifiers, in a closed room where inanimate objects listened to me and to one another. So I came forward with my mother’s letter in my hand and I asked that her crimes be forgiven and forgotten. I thought that if she was rehabilitated, she would be allowed to come out of exile and return to China, and I could see her once more. Love is a revolutionary act, I argued. My mother had broken with the Old Ways, with the suffocating hierarchies of Confucianism, and she had embraced her destiny.

  “What a mistake. I should better have argued that Emperor Hirohito and Chiang Kai-shek deserved a villa in France, paid for by the Communist Party of China. I should have heeded the wise saying, no flower can bloom for a hundred days. Every joke ends! At first, they listened to me and were compassionate. ‘Brave Edison,’ they said, ‘it is right that you show this fidelity to your lost mother. You are a faithful son of the Revolution!’ The Hundred Flowers Movement was still a spring bouquet and anything could be said. It was an exciting time, my friend. All of us, young and old, were awakening towards freedom. I felt a deep pride in my country and I know I wasn’t the only one. So of course, I didn’t stop there. I went on about the waste in the village bureaucracy, the favours and bribes that bankrupted the poor, the laughable quality of our scientific education, even the quality of our trains. ‘With all the gifts of our homeland,’ I proclaimed, ‘we should be the flowering tree of modernity!’

  “The Anti-Rightist Campaign began. Everyone with something to lose, from our Great Helmsman to the local village brute, had heard enough. They summoned me to a meeting in town. I was convinced that my mother had finally arrived and I would see her again! I spent a fortune on a new set of clothes and a jade necklace for her. A very bourgeois thing to do, I admit. When I arrived at the hall, there were hundreds of people already there. I searched every face for hers. A dozen times I thought I saw her.

  “I heard my name echoing on the loudspeaker. It was as if I was underwater and my name was breaking apart in the current. Two cadres pushed me up onto the stage where a man stood, holding my mother’s letter. I was ecstatic. I looked all around, convinced she waited behind the curtains. The man waved the letter in my face to get my attention. I tried to focus. The man accused me of bourgeois familial tendencies and gross sympathy for the enemy. ‘What enemy?’ I asked, confused. He slapped my face. Enraged, I tried to grab the letter from his hands but it ripped. I had to get away, I thought, so that I could find her. She was somewhere in this room. ‘Ma,’ I called. ‘I am here. Where have they put you?’ The two cadres tied my arms with ropes as if I was a beast. The crowd began to shout my name and curse me. I thought it was a dream. Someone was bleeding but it couldn’t be me. Someone was being beaten for the edification of the crowd, but surely it wasn’t me. I imagined that the letter expanded and covered me and hid me and everything became dark. I woke up when they emptied a bucket of water on me, and then I shouted in rage and called them betrayers, monsters and ghosts. My words touched no one; inst
ead, they were recorded in a file. This is how I know what was said: because the words have been repeated back to me so many times since then.

  “I was carted away to Jiabangou. For months I simply refused to believe that I was there. Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in schools or kicked out altogether, their houses were confiscated, their possessions trashed, their wives forced to beg on the streets, empty the public toilets and denounce their own husbands. We could protest all we wanted but it made no difference. The guards told us we were lucky that, not only had we been spared execution, but we had a roof over our heads and shoes on our feet.

  “There are many stages to hunger. By 1959, they were burying us by the truckload. The cold, young Sparrow, was metallic, bitter, and had appetites of its own. The cold crawls into your body and destroys you from the inside. Even the camp leaders told us not to waste our last days on this earth digging ditches. So we were free: free to wander the desert in search of something to eat. Wen the Dreamer used to say it was like searching an empty pocket for coins. Still, we persevered. There were times when the only thing we carried back, after an entire day of scavenging, was each other. Nothing in our stomachs but an echo. Wen weighed no more than a ten-year-old child. Often we didn’t have the energy to return to the caves and so we slept, unsheltered, in the open.

  “When he was weak, we sat so close our heads touched. He would pick up the story he’d been telling me as if he’d just set it down a moment ago, as if he had only to close his eyes and find the right page. His chest had caved in, his eyes had grown frighteningly large, and his bones were knives, but I think Wen was most afraid of silence. Again and again, he told me that his daughter was the light of his days and his wife was the centre of his world. I couldn’t help but fall in love with her, too. Every lovely thing in the air was his beloved Swirl: the turquoise sky, sand that shimmered like stars, the sunlight that touched our rough skins. He spoke to her at night as if she was seated beside us; when he had a fever, he would crawl out of the cave determined to find food for her. Once I saw him washing grains of sand in a pot of water, convinced that he was cleaning the rice for his suffering Swirl. But even mad, he could tell stories. Maybe he told them better than in saner days, I wouldn’t know. We swore never to leave one another because the worst fate would be to feel abandoned in this frozen and beautiful world. It is one thing to suffer, another thing to be forgotten.