Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

She remembered, in April, riding her bicycle down Chang’an Avenue, how this wide street had felt like a path not only to the middle of the city, but to the centre of her life. The open, unwalled space of the Square. She thought of the records of Prokofiev and Bach and Shostakovich that Sparrow used to bury under the floor in Cold Water Village, she thought of Big Mother Knife and Ba Lute who were on their way to Beijing. She thought of her mother’s face, once so impassive, now incapable of hiding her pain. How could this be the same street? How could these be the very same walls? How could she ever pretend that it was?

They walked back down the alleyway. The door was open. In a dream, Ai-ming entered, thinking that Sparrow had come home. All the cupboard doors in the kitchen had been flung open. She heard a noise in the back room, her bedroom.

“Wait,” Yiwen said. “Don’t go in.”

Ai-ming pulled her hand out of Yiwen’s. She kept going. In her parents’ room the dresser had been overturned.

She could hear voices, a woman and a man.

She turned the corner and entered. All her books lay jumbled on the floor. Neither the woman nor the man were familiar to her, nor were they wearing a uniform of any kind. The woman asked for Sparrow’s residency permit and his factory badge. Her voice was almost kind. Ai-ming shook her head. The man was busy rummaging through papers. He tore up her study notes. He began to tear up the piece of music that had been sitting on the table, her father’s composition. The man did it tiredly, almost without thinking, that’s what it looked like to Ai-ming, as if he was just folding laundry or washing dishes. She began to cry for help. Yiwen was there, she shouted at the strangers to get out, to leave them alone. The woman told them to find Sparrow’s work unit ID because they would be back. For reasons Ai-ming could not understand, the man and woman went out through the window, climbing out into the alleyway. Yiwen tried to pick up the pieces of the composition but Ai-ming said, “Leave it, leave it.” She knelt down on the floor. She pulled the pieces from Yiwen’s hand and began to tear them up into smaller and smaller pieces. She wanted it all to disappear. Yiwen kept shouting at her, calling her name, grabbing pages back. It was only later, when Ai-ming finally stopped shaking, that she saw what she had done.

Yiwen salvaged what she could. But in the end, she and Ai-ming were only able to piece nine pages back together. The rest of Sparrow’s composition was gone.

—

Ling opened the front door soundlessly, slipped off her shoes and went into Ai-ming’s room. The moon was faint, the night was utterly quiet, and her daughter slept, curled up on her side, one hand splayed open. The book Ai-ming had been reading weeks before, The Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky , lay on the floor beside her, still open. Three days had passed since officers from Public Security had entered the apartment. Ai-ming had tidied the room and gotten rid of the mess the agents had left behind, but still Ling imagined she could see their footprints beside the desk, as if they had been chiselled into the floor.

Ling sat down on the floor, beside the footprints.

Ai-ming seemed to turn slightly. In sleep, her daughter’s fear lifted momentarily, so she appeared younger, more like the child she had been.

She wished to crawl into the bed beside Ai-ming, to fall asleep and wipe away her own thoughts. Since June 4, her colleagues at Radio Beijing had been pressured, one by one, into writing denunciations of the student movement; a few had been purged. Life had gone on; it had slipped backwards. It was only a matter of time, Ling knew, before she, too, gave in. The new political study sessions, mandatory for everyone, required them to pledge their support to the Party. If someone believed differently, dreamed differently, society could make sure there were no longer jobs, or space, for them. How easily the day-to-day had resumed.

In any case, her colleagues, too, had seen what she had seen, and they, too, had joined in the weeks of demonstrations. But Ling had gone to the hospitals alone on June 4. She had seen all kinds of people jeering the soldiers, screaming, weeping. Businessmen in suits, cadres from the street offices and residents’ committees, nurses, construction workers, factory men. At Fuxing Hospital, on the ground and in the courtyard, and in a bicycle shed, were bodies. Two long sheets of paper affixed to a wall listed the names of the known dead. She had seen the corpse of a young man, the strap of his camera still looped around his wrist. She had seen women her own age. Bodies lay even at the entrance. A nurse came, begging her to give blood. The hospital had run out, she said, and people were needlessly dying. “At Muxidi. At Xidan…” Around Ling, people moved too fast or too slow. She had given blood in a chaotic room, and then continued on to the Children’s Hospital, the Post Hospital, and then to the Beijing Medical Centre. The injured multiplied and became never-ending. She had looked into every face and examined every piece of clothing. Looking at feet and shoes, at mouths, at eyes, multiple gunshot wounds, wrecked bodies. In the morgue, they were laid on straw mats or strips of stained white cloth. There was a book of records. If the name was unknown, the nurses and doctors had listed the deceased’s sex and estimated age, the objects in his or her pockets, the colour of a jacket or the pattern of a shirt. After leaving People’s Hospital, she had run into soldiers. They had fired at civilians in a senseless, indiscriminate manner, shouting out that the passersby were counter-revolutionaries. Hooligans. Ling had pedalled blindly home, too distraught to be afraid. When she reached her own door, she had gripped the handle, unable to move, an icy numbness spreading out from her heart. In the first few days, she had felt almost nothing.

Now, in Ai-ming’s bedroom, she could see, as clearly as if it were in her hands, the statement she had written but had not yet signed, supporting the use of force by the army against the demonstrators. Pledging her allegiance to Deng Xiaoping, to Premier Li Peng and the Communist Party. She saw the hospitals. She thought of Kai, the Professor, Zhuli, the Old Cat. She saw decades of deception and love, and also a lifetime of fidelity. She saw false surfaces that slice through everything, two-dimensional edges that could cut to the very centre of things.

Moonlight slid against her daughter’s face, making it appear angular, smooth and cold. She stood up and went to the outer room. Sparrow’s record player had a film of dust that bothered her and she instinctively took a cloth and proceeded to wipe it carefully, every side of it. When she was done, she opened the lid. The record inside was a recording by Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C Minor. What was the last thing Sparrow had said to her? What was the last look he had given her? Their lives were bound together, Ling knew. She set the needle down and music swayed into life, the steady river of the piano, the lyrical exactitude of the violin.

Afterwards, when she lifted the record and replaced it in its cardboard sleeve, Ling found letters. All the letters written from Canada and Hong Kong.

At work the next day, the new director of the station summoned Ling to his office. He informed Ling that her husband’s body had been recovered on the morning of June 4, and that he had already been cremated.

“His body?” she said. The ceiling fan spun so slowly, as if all the electricity in the building was being funnelled out.

“You should collect his ashes from the crematorium. I have the address here. Within three days, if the ashes are not collected, the crematorium will have no choice but to dispose of them.”