Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  Facing waves of applause, Li cried out, “Let us build a just society, a revolutionary China fit for a musical people!”

  Beside Sparrow, the young woman sighed as if wishing to propel herself onto the stage where the musicians were now filing out in solemn rows.

  The Central Philharmonic wore their everyday clothing, grey or blue slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirts. Sparrow’s heart was beating so oddly, he felt it was detaching from his body. The sound of the orchestra tuning chilled him; strings, woodwinds and brass made their simultaneous climb or descent to a sustained A, and an oboe fluttered up the scale like a thought set loose. Sparrow had not seen a score since 1968, and the ones used by the Philharmonic appeared to be hand-copied. The music stands, too, were makeshift, held together by tape, string and wooden splints. He felt the clattering tap of Li Delun’s baton on the music stand as if the conductor had rapped on Sparrow’s own spine.

  Mahler’s Ninth Symphony rose in a tentative hum.

  The house lights had remained up and every face in the audience, every small reaction, was visible. No one fidgeted. On stage, the musicians leaned forward, as if they were sliding across the same tilting boat. A bright red banner gave way at one corner, “Premier Zhou Enlai lives forever in our hearts.” It folded diagonally but didn’t fall.

  Danger seemed to come from every side. The young woman’s hands were covering her face and he wanted desperately to take them and place them in her lap. You must not let them see, he thought. If they see that you are devoted to it, they will take it from you.

  The reverie of the first movement sharpened to a hallucinatory edge. Sparrow silenced the music by thinking about Mahler himself. Late in life, the composer had discovered, in German translation, the poets Li Bai and Wang Wei, and their poetry had provided the text for Mahler’s song symphony, “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth). The poems had been translated into French, and then into German, and from there Mahler had made his own additions so that the poems, copies of mistranslated copies, were almost untraceable to their beginnings. But some were known, including Wang Wei’s “Farewell,” familiar to everyone of his and his mother’s generation, even if they no longer recited the lines. “At odds with the world, return to rest by the south hill…”

  Over the next hour, Sparrow succeeded in pushing away the sound of the orchestra. It was warm in the hall and his shirt was damp, the damp hardening to an icy cold.

  There was no intermission. As the piano was being wheeled out for Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, Li Delun came to the microphone again. “We dedicate this Concerto No. 5 to our resurrected comrade, He Luting, President of the Shanghai Conservatory,” he said. “Long live Chairman Deng! Long live the Communist Party of China! Long live our country!” In the hall, surprise and consternation but also sustained applause and even, Sparrow thought, cautious jubilation. Amidst the noise Kai came forward and took his seat at the piano. It was small, the kind a well-to-do family might have kept in their home before the Cultural Revolution. It was the first piano Sparrow had seen since 1966.

  Kai sat with his back rigidly straight. He had no score in front of him. Sparrow could see where his trousers, cuffed unevenly, lifted to expose his ankles. The pianist waited, both hands on his thighs, as the concerto opened in controlled exclamations, vibrating across the auditorium. Kai began, traversing the scales with a familiar clarity, only the tips of his body–head, fingers and feet–moving. Inside Sparrow’s head, multiple versions played; he simultaneously saw the performance and heard a memory, a recording. He listened to the immense space between then and now. When the allegro began, Sparrow closed his eyes. Up and down the scales again, as if Kai were telling him there is no way out, there is only the path back again, and even when we think we’re free, we only endlessly return. The concerto’s beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body. He remembered, long ago, playing Flying Bear’s violin for Zhuli. Beside him, the young woman’s eyes were glassy with tears that did not fall. Sparrow could not imagine weeping openly. He inhaled and found himself, against his will, listening. Near the end of the movement, the first, jubilant chords repeated, but the notes no longer conveyed the original feeling. Underneath was an ending, a buried movement, the sound of one life held captive by another. The concerto swept on, never pausing to dwell on its own astonishing constructions.

  On stage, the first violinist played with his whole body and then, suddenly, as if remembering the audience, he closed up again. Sparrow tried to place Zhuli before him. Beneath the violin, her supporting arm had always appeared so pale. He remembered her humility before the music, even as a child she had felt accountable to it. The notes went on, as if living another life. He could have followed Kai to Beijing. But he had never known how to write music, to perform music, and yet be silent.

  Tumultuous applause swept over him. Kai stood, all the musicians stood, their white shirts, damp with sweat, feathery against their bodies. The encores came.

  Sparrow saw the young woman staring straight ahead and he recognized in her an ambition, a desire, that he was certain he no longer possessed. Would he ever contain that hunger, that wholeness, again?

  —

  Late that night, he played a series of nothings on an erhu that Kai gave him. Songs broke off and became other songs, Shajiabang sliding into “Night Bell from the Old Temple,” breaking into a fragment of Bach’s Partita No. 6 as if music blew through his mind like scattered pages. He kept on this way, playing the beginning of one piece and the end of another, and Kai lay back and gazed at the nearness of the ceiling. Kai had the key to this room where the Philharmonic’s instruments and record players were stored, but they could have been in Room 103, in Shanghai, in the remote Northwest or the far South, anywhere with four walls and only the two of them. Sparrow let himself believe they had found their way back to an earlier time. Kai asked him to play “Moon Reflected on Second Spring,” and Sparrow played it once, and once again, realizing that he could not recall the last time he had heard it. Perhaps on the radio in 1964. After that, it had simply disappeared. He felt a humming in his hands and a renewed, almost unbearable, pleasure. By the time professors from the Central Conservatory had discovered the composer of “Moon Reflected,” the blind erhu player, Ah Bing, was in his seventies. “If only you had come ten years earlier,” Ah Bing had famously said, “I could have played better.” The professors captured six songs on a recorder before they ran out of wire. When the songs reached the capital, Ah Bing was acclaimed as one of the nation’s master composers. He died only a few months later, and those six recorded songs became all that survived of his work. “Moon Reflected on Second Spring” was an elegy, a spiral of both radiance and sorrow.

  Kai had other records. Overcome with curiosity, Sparrow set the erhu aside. Going through the collection, he felt like a child standing before a wall of colours. He chose Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Kai pushed blankets under the door to dampen the sound and opened another bottle of baijiu. They lay side by side on the thin mat, the tops of their heads grazing the record player.

  “Shostakovich was criticized for the fourth movement,” Kai said. “Do you remember? The Union of Composers said it was inauthentic joy.”

  “But inauthentic joy is also an emotion, experienced by us all.”

  “The censors are always the first to recognize it, aren’t they?” Kai smiled and time ran backwards. Biscuit. The name came unexpectedly to Sparrow. He had known the young woman in the pale green skirt and flowered blouse. She had been a violinist. She had been the same age as Zhuli.

  Kai was still speaking. “Later on, Shostakovich reused pieces of the fourth movement in his patriotic work, cantatas to Stalin and so on. Did you know? All those fragments of inauthentic joy. In 1948, when his music was banned, he publicly accepted the wisdom of the Party. But, each night, after the long meetings, he went home an
d composed. He was working on his Violin Concerto No. 1 and, for the first time, he hid his name inside the work.”

  Sparrow knew but had not thought of it in years. The signature, D, E-flat, C and B, which in German notation read D, Es, C, H, curled like a dissonance, or a question, in Shostakovich’s music.

  The Fifth was everything Sparrow remembered, tortured, contradictory, lurid, gleeful. The room ceased to exist, the record itself became superfluous, the symphony came from his own thoughts, as if it had always been there, circling endlessly.

  Sip by sip, the wine loosened their reserve. Kai said that in Beijing, in 1968, the struggle sessions had started up all over again. Mass denunciations were moved into stadiums. He saw a student humiliated and tortured in front of thousands of Red Guards.

  “For what crime?”

  “He said the children of political criminals shouldn’t be persecuted. That class status shouldn’t pass down across generations.”

  The children of class enemies. Like Zhuli. Like Ai-ming. “What was his punishment?”

  Kai turned, surprised by the question. “He died.”

  When Sparrow asked how, he said, simply, “They shot him.”

  Kai wiped his hand over his mouth. “Ozawa has promised to bring a few of us to America. I have this hope…”

  The last time they had been alone, Shanghai was on the verge of change. This small room seemed to Sparrow like a hidden space inside the Conservatory. When he left this room, perhaps the door would lead him back to the hallway of the fourth floor, where the walls were covered with posters. He would arrive in his office before it was too late, he would tell his cousin that all things, even courage, pass from this world. Everything passes. But he could not get there in time. When he entered the room, he saw her again, just as she was. Each year, as he grew older, as the Zhuli in his memory grew younger, as Da Shan and Flying Bear drifted further away, he knew he should let them go. But how could he explain it? The person inside him, the composer who once existed, would not allow it. And Sparrow, himself, could not erase the composer. The composer wanted to tell Kai that no one, not even Deng Xiaoping, and nothing, no reform or change or disavowal, could return those years to them.

  “Sometimes I think of leaving. If you had the chance to go overseas, Sparrow, would you?”

  He smiled, wanting to make light of himself. “Even taking the train to Shanghai during Spring Festival feels like crossing the ocean. I never thought I would grow accustomed to the South but, after all this time, I feel at home here.” When he heard the words spoken aloud, they felt true.

  Kai gestured towards the ceiling as if it were Inner Mongolia. “All the educated youth are going out of their minds, trying to get back to the city. And in Shanghai, they’re rioting, there are no jobs. Sparrow, look at it from their perspective. It would be unimaginable to them that someone could turn down a position at the Conservatory.”

  “I prefer to wire a circuit board than to compose a symphony.” Inside the factory, Sparrow’s hands had learned another language entirely. His body had altered. Chairman Mao had not been wrong, to change one’s thinking, one had only to change one’s conditions.

  Kai lit a cigarette and gave it to him. They were the luxury Phoenix brand, which Sparrow had never even seen before. Kai lit another for himself, holding it out to one side. The ashes fell harmlessly onto the concrete floor. The ceiling disappeared behind smoke.

  “I used to hear music in everything,” Sparrow said, but the sentence hung between them. He did not know how to finish it.

  “Dear Sparrow…” As Kai exhaled, he changed position so that the crook of his left arm partially covered his face. “I’m sorry for everything, I’m truly sorry….we were all alone but Zhuli’s situation was the most desperate. We all betrayed ourselves in some way. Not you…but I responded in the only way that I knew how. All I wanted was to protect those years of effort, to protect what I loved. I know I was wrong.” The words seemed to come from a far corner of the room, detached from Kai. “We all made mistakes….but can’t you see that it’s finished now. More than a decade has passed….She always said your talent was the one that mattered and she was right. What happened to your Symphony No. 3? It was your masterpiece. It was so full of contradictions, so immense and alive. I haven’t heard it in ten years, but I could still play it….You must have finished it by now.”

  “I can’t even remember how it began,” he said. He wanted to ask Kai if he had denounced Zhuli, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. And it was true that everyone had denounced another to save themselves, even Ba Lute, even his brothers. Kai’s answer wouldn’t bring her back. “You loved her, too, didn’t you?”

  “Zhuli is gone,” he said quietly. “Many people are gone, can’t you see?”

  “I don’t see.”

  Kai turned onto his side and looked at him, a beseeching look. He crushed out his cigarette and unthinkingly lit another, unable to bear the silence.

  “At Premier Zhou Enlai’s funeral,” he said, “I went to Tiananmen Square, I read the posters and the letters people had left behind. I memorized them. Let me tell you, world / I do not believe / I don’t believe the sky is blue / I don’t believe that dreams are false / I don’t believe that death has no revenge. Everyone read them and I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change? Around Tiananmen Square, there were so many mourners…hundreds of thousands of workers. Crying openly because for a day or two, they could grieve in public. The police came and gathered up all the funeral wreaths. People were outraged. They gathered in the Square shouting, ‘Give us back our flowers! Give them back!’ They shouted, ‘Long live Premier Zhou Enlai!’ ”

  Sparrow wanted to listen to Symphony No. 5 again, to the reflective and reflecting largo. Shostakovich was a composer who had finally written about scorn and degradation, who had used harmony against itself, and exposed all the scraping and dissonance inside. For years his public self had told the world that he was working on a symphony dedicated to Lenin, but no trace of that manuscript had yet been found. When he was denounced in 1936, and again in 1948, Shostakovich answered, “I will try again and again.” Did the composer inside Sparrow have the will to do this? But if he knew the will and the talent were gone, what good would it do to begin again?

  “Sparrow, remember the classics we memorized? The words are still true. ‘We have no ties of kinship or even provenance, but I am bound to him by ties of sentiment and I share his sorrows and misfortunes.’ We’ve waited our whole lives and now the country is finally opening up. I’ve been thinking…there are ways to begin again. We could leave.”

  The possibilities before Sparrow, which should have given him joy, instead broke his heart. He was no longer the same person.

  I used to be humbled before music, he thought. I loved music so much it blinded me to the world. What right do I have, do any of us have, to go back? Repetition was an illusion. The idea of return, of beginning over again, of creating a new country, had always been a deception, a beautiful dream from which they had awoken. Perhaps they had loved one another, but now Sparrow had his parents to care for. They relied on him, and his life was not his own, it belonged to his wife and to Ai-ming as well. And it was true, factory work had brought a peace he had never known before. The routine had freed him.

  Kai’s mouth was against his shoulder, the skin of his neck. They lay like this, unable to move forward, unable to continue.

  Kai said, “What you said is true. I loved her. I loved you both.”

  “There was no shame in that.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “But I was ashamed.”

  “We were young.”

  “It was a kind of love, only I didn’t comprehend.”

  “If you have the chance to go to America, you must go. Don’t let the opportunity pass. After all you’ve seen, all that’s been done, don’t turn back. Your family, and Zhuli, too, would have said the same.”

  Kai nodded.
>
  Was he weeping, Sparrow thought. The alcohol and the cigarettes had cleared his head and heightened his desire. There was no need to weep, he knew. They were fortunate, they had seen through the illusion. Even if the country went on, they could never be made to forget. I loved you both, Sparrow thought. I love you both.

  “I’m sorry, Sparrow,” he said. “I would sacrifice anything to be a different person. Please. Please let me help you leave.”

  “No,” Sparrow said. Zhuli is here, he thought. And the composer had long since gone away, only Sparrow himself had failed to recognize it. But he need only to look down at his tired, calloused hands to know. “My life is here.”

  —

  Ten years later, at the Shanghai Conservatory, Ai-ming was impeded by every kind of music: trills and percussion, a violin reciting a flotilla of notes. The Bird of Quiet walked ahead of her. In the new trousers, baby blue shirt, and leather shoes that Ling had given him for 1988 Spring Festival, her father looked taller. Or, maybe he only looked this way because, when he wore his usual clothes, the uniform of Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, Sparrow never stood up straight.

  Her father ran up the narrow road of the Conservatory as if someone up ahead was calling him.