Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Behind his small brick house, the dirt road led out into the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Just this morning, a camel train had swayed by, returning home after a seventy-eight-day journey across the Gobi, the emptied humps of the animals sagging over like devastated pillows. Having never seen a camel in her life, Ai-ming had thought their humps were injured. Projectionist Bang had laughed so hard, his hearing aid had fallen out. Ai-ming had wanted to disappear into the ground, or though the nearby gate of Jiayuguan, the Gate of Sorrows, where the western reach of the Great Wall came to an end. She had once fancied herself a scholar, but she didn’t even know that a camel’s hump emptied and grew soft like a deflated balloon.

Swirl had intervened, reminiscing of a camel she had known in her thirties, during her time at Farm 835. The camel’s name had been Sasha.

Now, again, Projectionist Bang was struggling with his hearing aid and it looked like he was trying to reattach his ear. “Oh,” he said, when he had managed to get it right. “About the piano you wanted, I found one. The pianist is an old rightist, exiled to Dunhuang in 1958, used to be a physicist. His sentence finally ended last year but he hasn’t got around to going home. It’s just like the old books say, ‘Even the Emperor is an exile on these dusty roads.’ Anyway, we looked over the piece of music, those nine pages, and he said he could prepare it in a few days. Stitch it together somehow. At least we’ll get an idea of what it sounded like.”

“Projectionist Bang,” Swirl said, “if you play the violin part, I think it will be just right. Can you do it on your erhu?”

“Sure, sure,” Bang said. “We’re a bloody orchestra out here.”

—

Ai-ming, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer had been travelling together for five weeks, 2,500 kilometres, by train, bus, cart, moped and foot. Her great-uncle and great-aunt, already in their seventies, had the tenacity of llamas. Everything they owned was packed in a single suitcase, a piece of luggage meticulously cared for, yet so battered it looked as if it had lived ten thousand lives. Swirl and Wen could survive on hot water and radishes, eating sunlight and dusty air. She wasn’t sure if they slept because whenever she opened her eyes, at midnight or 3 a.m. or dawn, they were always awake.

Wen had told her stories of the desert, Comrade Glass Eye and her own father, the Bird of Quiet. Swirl told her about Big Mother Knife, Lady Dostoevsky and Zhuli. Sometimes Ai-ming cried for no reason, even when the story was a happy one. Sometimes, when the story was sad, she felt nothing, not even the beating of her own heart.

Now, Swirl was sorting through the pages of another set of the Book of Records because they had fallen on the ground and gotten out of order. Ai-ming was watching Wen the Dreamer. His face had an angular sharpness, an immense calm. In the sunlight, his white hair was nearly transparent.

Wen had decided to hand-copy the last chapter. He was using the cursive script and, as he drew each character, the brush barely left the page. There was something circular, watery and eternal about it all.

He looked up at her and set aside his brush. The word he had just written was 宇 (yǔ) which meant both room and universe. “Child, do you know where you want to go?”

She remembered walking with her father to Tiananmen Square and how she had said to him: Canada . Now she said, “I don’t know. I just want to leave everything behind.”

He looked at her sadly. “But after doing even that, one day you might have to find another way to continue.”

“How?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. His picked up his brush and continued writing. The small stack of notebooks beside him seemed to lift slightly, like the ribs of an accordion. She studied the photo he kept beside him. Zhuli was holding her violin as if it was the instrument, the wood and strings — and not her thoughts, not her future — that needed protecting. What if this is where I should stay, Ai-ming wondered. What if I can’t survive on my own? She felt like a stranger to herself, as if her body was in fact a giant house, but she had only ever bothered to visit one room.

“How to continue,” Wen said. “Your father wondered this too. For many years he didn’t write music at all. Chairman Mao gave us one way of looking at the world, and so did Marx, Engels and Lenin. All the poets and writers, all the philosophers. They agreed on the problems but never the solutions. Shostakovich and Bach gave your father another way of listening. I think about your father every day…Perhaps, later on, when he composed again, he tried to hear these different voices simultaneously with his own, so that his music would have to come from broken music, so that the truths he understood wouldn’t erase the world but would be part of it. When I was alone, I often asked myself, Can a single hand cover the sky? How can we live like this and see so little? Ai-ming…I have so many regrets. Everyone tells me how much you resemble Zhuli. Don’t ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?”

She didn’t understand.

His brush came to the end of a line. Chapter 42, when May Fourth reaches the end of the desert. She’s aged so much, and her friend Da-wei has long since passed on from this world.

“Uncle Wen, how many chapters do you think there are?”

“Once I asked my wife the very same question. She told me, Wen the Dreamer, it’s foolhardy to think that a story ends. There are as many possible endings as beginnings.’ ”

—

The desert air made Ai-ming feel lightheaded. She had taken to sleeping early, waking late, and to napping after lunch and before dinner. Each time she opened her eyes, she felt as if her head was enormous, her hands tiny, and her lungs crushed. One afternoon, she woke up and heard the voices of her three caretakers and Big Mother Knife, who had arrived from the South to be with them, and had managed to obtain false papers for Ai-ming. Big Mother could see very little now, and sometimes, when she thought too much about Sparrow and her boys, tears leaked from her good eye, itself now failing. Ai-ming had never seen her grandmother mourn, she would gently wipe the tears and Big Mother would grumble, “Who’s that?” “It’s me.” “Ah, you.”

“If my granddaughter crosses into Kyrgyzstan,” Big Mother was saying now, “what’s the next logical step?”

“Are you kidding? If she makes it even that far, the next step would be a generous cash offering to the Queen Mother of the West.” This was Projectionist Bang.

“What about arranging passage through Istanbul? She says she wants to go to Canada.”

“Canada?”

“Sparrow has a friend there. A musician.” Big Mother paused. “Sparrow had.”

Ai-ming stared unblinking at the bright room. The truth was, she was terrified of the future. She would never study at Beijing University, never follow Yiwen, never join the Communist Party and then never renounce her membership, never leave flowers at Tiananmen Square. Ai-ming had written the examinations, she had scored high, but when the results came, she had told her mother she would not, could not, stay. Ling had not seemed surprised. “Your father wanted you to be able to choose,” she said. But what if it was all a mistake? What if she simply didn’t have the courage? It would take courage to continue living in Beijing. Her mother had already quit her job at the radio station, and moved back to Shanghai to be with the Old Cat. Ai-ming was afraid that life, which had seemed to be expanding forward, had stopped and turned around. That it would carry her forever backwards.

She thought she had been weeping soundlessly, but Swirl came into the room. She was as graceful and beautiful as a written word, but any word could be so easily erased. One day, Ai-ming thought, unable to stop the flow of emotion, I’ll open my eyes and every one of you will be gone, and I’ll be all alone. Swirl stroked her hair. When her great-aunt looked at her, what did she see? Am I truly a construction? One day, will someone become a construction of me, a replica?