Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  From Hangzhou I took the train to Shanghai, where I visited the Conservatory. I found nothing on Kai, Zhuli or Sparrow; it was as if they had never been.

  That night in Shanghai, I fell asleep to the clamour of radios, a profusion of opera, disco, Beethoven, shouting and speech. When I woke, nothing stirred. It was as if my bed had fallen into outer space. In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ←. Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is “the year above” ↑ and next year is “the year below” ↓. The day before yesterday (前 天) is the day “in front” ↑ and the day after tomorrow (後天) is the day “behind” ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind (後 代). Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around, a mirroring echo of Walter Benjamin’s famous evocation of the angel of history, “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” How we map time, how it becomes lived and three-dimensional to us, how time is bent and elastic and repeated, has informed all my research, proofs and equations.

  When I was a child, I would continuously pester Ai-ming. “Don’t stop!” “What happened to Swirl and Big Mother Knife?” Or: “What happened to Zhuli? Don’t let it finish!” She had come into my life at the crux of her own. She was a sister to me; from the beginning we were joined, two halves of the world Sparrow and Kai had left behind. Long after she departed, Ai-ming’s voice tugged away at my thoughts, returning me again and again to the same ever-expanding, ever-contracting piece of music. Could I awake now and cross towards her? Near the end, she seemed almost to forget that I was there and it was as if the story came from the room itself: a conversation overheard, a piece of music still circling the air.

  ZHULI WAS IN ROOM 103, following the magisterial Prokofiev up his porcelain staircases, when Kai entered without knocking. She ignored him: Prokofiev required all her concentration. Every measure brought her closer to the disgraced Russian, who had been accused by Stalin of formalism, his major compositions banned; yet in this room, Prokofiev was becoming flesh and blood while Zhuli herself was vanishing. From eighths to sixteenths then three times as fast, the notes chipped into one another, every note had to touch the air, make its singular gesture, and elaborate this unending melody.

  And then, the music stopped. Her bow stopped. It was as if she could hear nothing, or had forgotten everything, or had been pushed underwater. Trembling, she lowered her violin. Kai and Sparrow had only just returned from Wuhan the previous day. She had heard Sparrow coming in after midnight.

  Kai was still watching her.

  “What do you want?” She hadn’t meant to say it so brusquely, but the expression on his face, the pity, enraged her. “I reserved this room until eleven o’clock! And, as you know, the piano is in terrible condition anyway.”

  “Will you come upstairs with me?”

  Ah, she thought, looking back at her violin, glimpsing her own reflection. Who was real and who was false?

  “Comrade Zhuli,” he said. “Something has happened.”

  She wiped the strings of her bow, latched her violin case and followed him out of the room. At the staircase, he took hold of her hand briefly. All the way to the fourth floor, her hand prickled with heat and discomfort. She heard yelling above them. The staircase became chaotic. Zhuli was separated from Kai and pushed down the corridor. On both sides, the walls were covered with dà zì bào, big character posters, the same as had appeared in Bingpai long ago. She glimpsed the word yāo, which seemed to crawl from sheet to sheet. Someone, or something, was being denounced. The language of these attacks was copied from newspaper editorials, these were the same words that spilled endlessly from Party cadres and shouting loudspeakers,

  WE MUST SWEEP AWAY THE HORDE OF DEMONS WHO HAVE ENTRENCHED THEMSELVES IN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

  she stopped and students pushed roughly past her, laughing.

  BREAK THE BOURGEOIS “SPECIALISTS,” “SCHOLARS,” “AUTHORITIES” AND “VENERABLE MASTERS” AND TRAMPLE EVERY BIT OF THEIR PRESTIGE INTO THE DUST.

  Without realizing it, she had reached the office of He Luting, the President of the Conservatory, and she heard, absurdly, music. Could Professor He truly be practising inside his quarters? Yet there was no piano in his office and so the music, Debussy’s Petite Suite, with its uneasy mixture of triviality and sorrow, must be coming from a recording. Zhuli fought a hysterical wave of laughter. She had not heard Debussy for months, not since the composer had been targeted in Wen Hui Bao and the Beijing papers, his music labelled decadent, and the long-dead Frenchman a composer whose “elaborate impressionist cookery” was an insult to the hardships of the poor. Sparrow had confiscated all her Debussy scores and put them who-knows-where.

  “But ‘La plus que lente’ is inside my mind,” she had said, handing the music over. “Can you erase the Impressionist cookery in my mind?”

  The longest, most vitriolic poster had been affixed to Professor He’s door. The sheet, torn from butcher paper, was as tall as she was and the calligraphy, very square, was oddly beautiful. It was surrounded by other smaller posters. Zhuli stepped closer, the words wavering. The ink looked so freshly black, she thought she could wipe the malicious words off with her hands.

  She had almost touched the word yāo when Kai came up beside her. She turned to him, her hand outstretched and, out of nervousness, smiled. Her attention was caught by the dozens of posters continuing down the hallway. The words jeered and seemed to move, to come loose and slide along the walls. She saw a long essay, written in ungainly calligraphy, filled with names, and this list of “scholars” and “specialists” included Sparrow, Ba Lute, Professor Tan and a dozen more teachers and musicians. Stunned, she went closer. Petite Suite trickled and teased through the walls. It was the piano, not the names, that made her shudder. The music came to her as if she were watching a dozen points of glass falling towards them.

  “There are more posters,” Kai said. “In the courtyard and on the gates.”

  “But who is targeting them?” she said. She should have lowered her voice but she did not. “Why are they denouncing my uncle?”

  Kai was already pushing back into the crush of people, some chanting, some grinning like opera-goers. Here were Biscuit and her Page-Turners, as Zhuli called them, and here was the string class as if they always travelled ensemble.

  Zhuli said, “Ba Lute performed for Chairman Mao.”

  Nobody seemed to hear her except Biscuit, who looked at Zhuli with unexpected kindness.

  “My uncle was a hero at Headquarters,” Zhuli told her. “He led a battalion of the New Fourth Route Army.”

  Biscuit blinked nervously and looked away.

  Kai took her hand and pulled her behind him. At the end of the corridor, the noise lessened. How hot it was, how desperately humid, yet Kai’s hand was cool and dry. She clutched the handle of her violin case, stood very still and listened with all her strength, but under the bursts of contemptuous laughter she no longer heard the Debussy.

  —

  Outside, the posters were more precise and prescriptive. When Zhuli had arrived this morning, just before 6 a.m., the walls had been bare, so the posters must have been pasted up in broad daylight, with the approval of the class committees or even…Zhuli’s thoughts became confused. Big Mother Knife had been right. A new campaign was underway.

  STAND UP AND REBEL! KILL THOSE WHO WOULD SABOTAGE OUR REVOLUTION. STAND UP AND BE FREE.

  “It’s not just here,” Kai said as he led her through the east gate. “This morning there are denunciations at Jiaotong University, and even at the Beijing universities, at Tsinghua and Beida. They all say the same thing.”

  On Fenyang Road, people flowed to work, talking, complaining, pulling ch
ildren, weighed down by bags, water drums, instruments, birds, chairs, unidentifiable metal objects, pushed forward by hunger, routine, necessity, even joy. The air was sticky. Zhuli wanted to crouch down with her throbbing hands over her ears and block out the sun and the noise. No, she decided suddenly, her thoughts clearing. Those denunciations, those posters, could not be real.

  “How was your trip to Wuhan?” She spoke the words casually, as if they had just now met on the street. “Sparrow looked exhausted when he got up this morning. And yet here you are, already hard at work!”

  He looked at her steadily, as if trying to hear between the words. “I slept on the bus.”

  “And did you and my cousin come home with recordings full of music?”

  Kai still said nothing. He reminded her of a cat with one paw raised, about to touch the ground, momentarily confused.

  “That was your mission, wasn’t it?” she reminded him. “To traverse the countryside, to record and preserve the folk songs of our motherland.” Whose words was she using, she wondered. She forced herself to look him in the eye.

  “Oh,” he said, one hand shading his face from the sun. “We came back with three reels.”

  She wanted to beg him to come away with her, to come and play for a few hours. Or to go to the music library and browse the old recordings, there was a Shostakovich string quartet she longed to hear. Instead she said carelessly, “I have to go. I left my scores in Room 103.”

  “Forget them. Go home, Zhuli.”

  “I’m no prodigy like you,” she said. “I don’t improve by merely wishing it.”

  “This is the start of a new campaign. Don’t you understand?”

  The sincerity in his eyes brought both hope and fury to her.

  He said, “The Red Guards can turn your life to ashes. They will.”

  Before I met you, Zhuli thought, I had no one to please but myself. Jiang Kai, you are as real and unreal as the shadow of an airplane. She wanted to ask Kai if he loved Sparrow for who he was, or if it was his talent that was the true attraction. Didn’t he understand that a gift like Sparrow’s could not be bought or borrowed, it could not be stolen? Did Kai love the person, or did he love what Sparrow’s music made him feel? Her own thoughts surprised and upset her. She nodded brightly. “Until they do, I can only practise.”

  He smiled at her, in the way that Ba Lute sometimes smiled thinly at Flying Bear. Kai reached into his satchel and withdrew a sheaf of music. “Don’t be stubborn,” he said. “Take these.” She stared down. He had placed in her hands familiar pieces by the deceased composer Xian Xinghai, a hero of the Revolution.

  In her bewilderment, she felt entirely alone. The concrete buildings, crowded roads and all the passersby seemed to move inside a light that didn’t reach her. “Jiang Kai,” she said spitefully, “now I understand. I’ll forget Prokofiev. I’ll play the ‘March of the Volunteers’ and ‘The Internationale’ for all eternity. The old world shall be destroyed. Arise, slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing. That should win me the Tchaikovsky Competition and please everyone, you most of all.”

  There was his patronizing half-smile again. “Comrade Zhuli, don’t make the silly mistake of thinking your talent is enough.”

  “My talent doesn’t concern me,” she said. “What I need to know is, will Sparrow’s talent protect him? That’s what you and I care the most about, isn’t it?”

  Instead of speaking, he painstakingly tied up his bag, which was patched in both corners and on the strap. He should conduct, Zhuli thought, all his movements have the illusion of expressing so much.

  She wanted to ask him how he could acquiesce on the surface and not be compromised inside. You could not play revolutionary music, truly revolutionary music, if you were a coward in your heart. You could not play if your hands, your wrists, your arms were not free. Every note would be abject, weak, a lie. Every note would reveal you. Or perhaps she was wrong and Kai was right. Maybe, no matter his or her convictions, a great musician, a true genius, could play any piece and be believed.

  She wanted to put all these thoughts into questions but by the time she had recovered herself, Kai had turned and walked away.

  The movement in the street rustled and shamed her; no one else had a moment to rest, to think, to be afraid. Yet here she was, with time on her hands. She looked down at the music he had given her, which she saw now had been transcribed for violin and copied out by hand. Midway through, the notes wobbled and tilted, as if running into the wind. It must have taken him hours. But why would Jiang Kai do such a thing for her? When did he have time?

  She began walking, directionless, fearful that the posters trailed behind her like mud stuck to her shoes. The words: counter-revolutionary, monsters, blind feeling, false love, witch. Inside her head, Ravel’s Tzigane refused to be quiet. It billowed on and revealed itself as the composition of a madman. To escape, she rushed between the bicycles to Xiangyang Park. The grain and oil lineups snaked past her, and a line of grandmothers stood in studied silence, clutching their ration coupons. The sun was high now and the heat intolerable, but everyone seemed blank and unsweating. Of course, I will go back and find Kai and apologize, Zhuli thought, even though she kept walking. How many self-criticisms had she written? A thousand pages, two thousand? Yes, she was selfish and plagued by immoderate desires and yes, her love for music was a weakness. She had confessed these faults since she was eight years old, but she had stubbornly refused to purify her heart. Chairman Mao said, “To be aware of one’s own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them means taking a liberal attitude to oneself. These people talk Marxism but practise liberalism. Yes, this is how the minds of certain people work and they are extremely harmful to the revolutionary collective.” The park came like a sip of water. There was a shaded bamboo bench and she sat down, her violin case on her lap.

  In the grass, a boy, no more than five or six years old, was curled up on the ground while his mother stood a few feet away. She wore a grey suit and a grey cap made of wool, a furnace in this humidity. The mother had a ball which she nudged towards her son, but the boy ignored her. Even the ball was grey. She retrieved it, turned and kicked it back to him. Still her son did not move. He lay motionless in the grass like an injured animal. Minutes passed. The boy leaped up as if suddenly awakened.

  The boy went to the ball and faced his mother. But, unexpectedly, he turned and kicked the ball in the opposite direction. A thump echoed in the grove.

  The boy waited.

  The mother ran gracefully past her son and caught up with the ball. Undeterred, she returned it to him. Once again, he made as if to return it, but then, at the last moment, gave it a hard kick in the opposite direction. Once more, the mother chased it down. Again and again this scene repeated itself, the boy nastily kicking the ball away, the mother patiently retrieving it, the boy standing idly.

  Zhuli closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, she saw that the torment had ended and that the boy and his mother were playing. They dodged one another, feinted, floated the ball towards an imagined net.

  Zhuli slid sideways on the bench, opened her violin case and stared at the instrument. She had a lunatic desire to smash it on the ground. Beyond the park, she heard what sounded like an encroaching sea but was only Red Guards. “Down with Wu Bei!” the students shouted. “Kill the traitor, destroy the criminal gang, down with Wu Bei, down with Wu Bei!”

  The boy, who moments ago had been laughing in delight, inexplicably grew weary. His mother passed the ball to him and he abruptly turned and walked away. The ball rolled past him, into the trees. He sat down. His mother ran after the ball, tapped it back to her son and waited. When nothing happened, she pecked it forward again but the boy was now prone in the grass. Still his mother circled him, the ball creeping ahead of her. They seemed oblivious to the shouting of the Red Guards at the outskirts of the park. She had never seen a child and a mother act in this manner; it was as if the world had fallen on its side and the ch
ild had been shaken into irritable old age. The mother hovered in her shapeless grey suit. What was love to this child? It could be rescinded as easily as a command.

  “The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the People!” “What will you sacrifice, what will you sacrifice?” “Stand up and serve the Revolution!”

  Something is coming for me, Zhuli thought. “The more ruthless we are…” But an ocean, she thought, overcome suddenly by inappropriate laughter, only an ocean would destroy her. She closed the violin case and set it in carefully in the grass. Ravel’s Tzigane slid over the shouting and covered her thoughts. Note by note, the music began again, it sounded so fiercely that her arms strained from hallucinatory exertion, her shoulders ached, and yet the music in her thoughts played on lavishly. Music was pouring into the ground. Far away, the voices of the students sounded like weeping, “We must remake ourselves and change the world! We must serve the People with our hearts and minds! From the Red East there rises a sun, in China there appears a Mao Zedong!”

  Time, the park, the slogans, the mother and child: she pushed them all away.

  Time, the pressure of the strings against her fingers, the weightlessness of the bow, would not leave.

  When the last note ended, she awoke into the quiet. The demonstration had moved on. The grove was empty and the mother and the boy had vanished as if they had never been. Even the patch of shadow in which they had stood was gone.