Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I’ve looked everywhere for the rest of the novel,” Wen the Dreamer said. “There must be, at least, another five hundred pages. Maybe more. I think it’s called the Book of Records.”

“But you—” Swirl began. She kept her gaze on the manuscript, which seemed solid and unimpeachable.

“I made a copy of the book for you, because I hoped…I wanted…”

Swirl knew she should end the conversation. Yet she could not bring herself to move away from the table.

“I wanted the story to bring you pleasure. What the Old Cat says is true, the words are not mine.” His slender hands came together and clasped themselves. “I sent the first chapters before I finished copying the manuscript. When I realized what had happened, that the book ended, literally, in mid-sentence, I tried to write my own chapters. I tried to finish the story but I…”

“You did not have the talent,” the Old Cat said.

His wispiness grew sorrowful now. But still he did not falter or retreat, he stayed very still and would not stop looking at her.

“Perhaps one day.”

“Pardon me,” Swirl said, stepping backwards. She felt ashamed but could not fathom why she should feel this way, if the emotion belonged to him or to her. She turned and walked to the door and managed to twist it open. Fresh air filled her lungs and she heard pages fluttering on every side.

“You’d be amazed at how few people can tell a story,” the Old Cat was saying. The sound of her voice was as rough and reassuring as pebbles rolling together. “Yet still these new emperors want to ban them, burn them, cross them all out. Don’t they know how hard it is to come by pleasure? Or perhaps they do know. The sly goats.”

“Might I have the honour of walking you home?” Wen the Dreamer said.

The wind seemed to push her backwards and spin her around. But once she was facing him, once she saw his observant, hopeful eyes, words failed her. She opened her mouth and then closed it again.

“Heavens, the suspense!” the Old Cat said.

Finally, as if it were also the wind’s doing, Swirl nodded in answer to Wen. “If you must.”

Wen the Dreamer was at her side, he was holding the door, and she walked out.

Leaves were falling everywhere. Soon winter would come with its padded coats and knitted mittens and, at the arrival of the first frost, Wen the Dreamer would bring her scarves and woollen socks, jars of honey, and novels that he had copied by hand in his contained yet passionate script.

Winter was kind to Wen. His wispiness became a delicate kind of hardiness. Young girls and their mothers hung their washing across the alleyways and admired the elongated question mark of his body as he loped down the slippery walks, towards the teahouse where Swirl sang. “Don’t go too fast,” his neighbours called. “Your words will get scrambled!” He still didn’t know how to talk about the new political order, the different factions and all his ideals; lines of poetry occupied his thoughts, he wrote them down and threw them out. He wrote and wrote and burned the pages. He waited.

“Carrier pigeon!” they called him.

And, still, out of an insistent curiosity, Swirl began approaching strangers reading in teahouses to enquire if they were acquainted with Da-wei, if they had perhaps journeyed to the Taklamakan desert and been impressed by his ingenuity in sending private messages to his lover over the radio broadcast, even while tens of thousands of people listened? “Hiding in plain sight,” a well-dressed lady answered. “But, no, I’ve never heard of this devil.”

“Are you certain it’s a local writer?” a poet asked. “Everyone here is worthless. It must be a translation of a foreign work.” A university student was convinced it was plagiarized from a novel by She Lao, another thought it sounded like a modern retelling of Record of Heretofore Lost Works or maybe Li Mengchu’s Slap the Table in Amazement . “Anyway, don’t waste your time on novels,” someone told her. “The one to read right now is that upstart gun collector poet from Chengdu. Though, in general, anything universally praised is usually preposterous rubbish.”

One night she returned to the old notebooks, reading them all over again from the beginning. As her candle flickered, she became certain that the writer had gone into exile or perhaps met with some tragedy. Perhaps she was one of the war wounded, she had been torn from her former existence, and the novel was now no more than a dream disturbed. Or, perhaps, like Swirl’s husband, the writer had been killed in the fighting, and the last chapters could only be recovered in the next world. Wen had told her that it was not he but the author who had written the names of the major character — Da-wei and May Fourth — with different ideograms. Wen, too, believed, that the names were part of a code, a trail that someone could follow. But to what end? Swirl wrapped the notebooks carefully in brown paper; she must be vigilant. After all, the Book of Records was just a distraction from the realities of modern life. It was only a book, so why couldn’t she let it go? She opened her trunk and saw objects from her past, a vanished time and a former self. If she let her guard down, she could almost see her son crawling towards her. He was pulling on her dress, on her fingertips, his delight like a string around her heart. Swirl had given birth to him when she was just fourteen years old. On the night he died, it had been too dark, too windy, for a child to travel to the netherworld on his own. She had wanted to follow him over the cliff edge, into the sea, but Big Mother had wept and begged Swirl not to leave her.

She could not sleep and lay awake until morning.

A dull light framed the curtains. Swirl heard an infant weeping, went to the window and when she looked down, she saw a couple trying to fit their baby into his winter coat, adjusting arms then legs then head as the baby lolled and weakly fought, then scrunched up his face and wailed, and still the outerwear refused to fasten. Wen the Dreamer came along the avenue, a block of pages sticking out of his pocket. He leaned towards the weeping child like a comma in a line so that, momentarily, the child, confused, suspended his wailing, the outerwear was fastened, and the little family went on their tremulous way.

Later that morning, when she stood with Wen on Huaihai Road, when he venerated her missing parents and older brothers, her lost husband and beloved son, when he wished for the blessing of her older sister, Swirl had a pure memory of her little boy. He had lost his footing and fallen backwards from the tram onto the concrete. Not even a scratch on him. He had laughed and asked if he could do it again, and then he had reached out his frail hand and snatched the bread out of Sparrow’s mouth. Sparrow’s lips had closed over air, bewilderment flooding his little face.

On Huaihai Road, Wen was asking her to be his wife.

Swirl remembered the quiet of the bed when she had woken suddenly. She had picked up her son’s perfect hand, and a grey sadness seemed to move from his chest into hers, and in that moment, when she knew her child was dead, she lost her parents, her brothers and her husband all over again. Unable to stop crying, she had refused to let go of the child’s body. But he grew rigid and cold in death. Only Big Mother had finally managed to lift the body from her arms.

“Miss Swirl,” Wen said now, as shoppers with empty bags wandered past, “I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude. I will shelter our family. I will share your tears. I will bind my happiness to yours. Our country is about to be born. Let us, too, have the chance to begin again.”