Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Did she sense consternation? Had even the sunflower seeds suddenly turned cold?

“Our village would give your husband a great welcome,” the hardy young woman said. “If you could just let us know in advance so that all the necessary preparations can be made—”

“Oh no,” Big Mother said kindly. “He dislikes having a fuss made over him. As Chairman Mao so honourably says, ‘We cadres in particular must advocate diligence and frugality!’ But I’m certain he will visit, he has such great feeling for the people here, in particular, as I say, Comrade Wen the Dreamer. Please, have another candy.”

As the bus heaved on, the two women took turns pouring each other tea, sharing their dried fruit, and paying poetic tribute to their husbands, fathers and great leaders. Fourteen hours later, when the bus arrived in Shanghai, Big Mother Knife had consumed so many sunflower seeds she felt as if she could beat her wings and fly away. The young woman clasped her hands and wished her longevity, prosperity and revolutionary glory, and they stood calling to one another like traffic directors, long after the bus had emptied and filled once more. Big Mother walked home from the bus station, through the rowdy twilit streets, and the novel in her bag gave her a pleasant, illusory calm, as if she were leaving a secret meeting and the documents she carried could bring down systems, countries, lies and corruption.

Perhaps it was not the papers themselves, their secrets, that were were so explosive, but the names of the readers that must be protected. Courageous cliques, resistance fighters, spies and dreamers! She did not know why these thoughts came to her, but it was as if the very air shrouded the buildings in paranoia. How small yet heavy the notebooks felt. She began to wonder if Wen the Dreamer, during his hours of copying the Book of Records, had merged with the author or even the characters themselves, or perhaps he had transformed into something more expansive and intangible? When he finished copying, did he go back to being himself or were the very structures of his thoughts, their hue and rhythm, subtly changed? Past Beijing Road, she came to familiar streets, narrow laneways and finally the back door of their courtyard. Already she could hear a voice singing, a female colleague rehearsing with Ba Lute or perhaps just the radio, turned up wastefully high. When Big Mother entered the side wing of the house, her husband was hovering guiltily just inside the door, his shirt crookedly buttoned. He scratched his shiny head and looked at her in confused panic, blocking her entrance.

“Let me in, for heaven’s sake!” she cried.

Deflating, he folded sideways. She saw that the room was dark, that the only residual light came from the lamps outside. She set her bag down. “Did you run out of kerosene?” she asked. And then she heard it: a low trickle of sound beneath the blaring radio. She looked to Ba Lute for an explanation but he only shrugged and smiled sheepishly.

Her heart fell to her knees. A tart. A singer so operatic she needed ten radios at maximum volume to cover her cries. Grabbing the broom, Big Mother followed the sound towards the bedrooms. At the first door, she peered inside and saw her two youngest sons asleep, almost on top of each other, as if fleeing from dreams on the northern side of the bed. She pressed on to Ba Lute’s study. How did he dare? She would smash his nose, she would rip out his remaining hairs, she would…The door was closed but still the sound slid out, like water brimming from a glass. She turned the handle and pushed.

Two lamps glowed dimly on the far side of the room. She gazed in the direction of the light. Sparrow was sitting at his father’s desk, his pen poised over a long sheet of paper. There was paper, in fact, everywhere, in the armchair, on the carpet, cascading across the desk, balled-up sheets and ink-stained pages. On the record player, a disc turned.

“Have the men in this house lost their minds?” she said finally, lowering the broom.

Her son looked down and stared expectantly at the strewn pages as if they might answer on his behalf.

“Shall I leave this madhouse and return to the sane, oh yes, the marvellously sane, countryside?”

“Oh,” Sparrow said, when no one else answered. “No.”

“We have a minor, which is to say, a small and unimportant, school project,” Ba Lute said. That brute, that Song of the People, had come up behind her.

“A project! To exist in darkness like cavemen?” Big Mother asked. “To see how long it takes before state radio makes you deaf?”

Ba Lute pushed her gently into the room and shut the door behind them. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “It’s just that, some of our interests — a few musical interests — do not need to be broadcast.”

She picked up a sheet of paper from the floor and held it up to her good eye. She studied the numbers that climbed up and down the page, the numbers one through seven, the lines and dots, the chords lifting like ladders. They were transcribing music into jianpu notation.

“A school project?” she said, doubtfully.

“Extracurricular,” Sparrow said. There was ink on his face.

“But why?”

The music from the record player swirled faintly around them, adding its own thoughts to the conversation. The baroque constructions her son loved so much, Bach’s Goldberg Variations . Sparrow, grown so tall, was standing beside her now. When had the child grown? Only yesterday he had been running beneath the tables of the teahouses, wearing the rough green hat she had knitted for him, the little flaps cupping his ears.

“For pleasure,” her son said quietly.

“Yes,” Ba Lute said, as if the word had dropped from the sky. “For pleasure!”

“But what use is this? If it’s sheet music you want, why don’t you just take your son to Old Zhang? Jianpu is for little children and teahouse singers, not Conservatory students.” The record ran on, parsing its phrases into the air, and she saw that her husband and son were not listening to her, they were listening to it. “I’m tired,” she said abruptly. “I’m going to bed. Don’t bother me.” She turned and left the room, just as the music trumpeted into a bouquet of sound, raining down on her like false applause. She closed the door behind her.

All night, beneath the blare of the radio, music trickled through the house. She heard it, faintly, when she lay on her left side and then on her right, when she lay face down, face up, or diagonally across the bed. Finally, she crept out of her room and into bed with her boys. Flying Bear slept heavily, his paws curled and toes pointing up, but her dear Da Shan crossed the bed to be with her. This one, too, had grown too quickly. He rolled awkwardly into her arms. “I’m glad you are home, Mama,” he said, his voice drowsy with sleep. He clutched at her hand and held her, reminding Big Mother of Swirl and her little daughter, and that rough kang, and the quiet smoke from the cigarettes of Wen the Dreamer.

—

In the spring, Big Mother returned to Bingpai, and then twice more in the winter and following spring. Life had quieted in the village and although Swirl’s family still lived in the mud hut, the family had slowly begun to thrive again. Wen had begun farming half an acre of irrigated land and Swirl was teaching in the schoolhouse.

In all this time, Big Mother had not opened the box containing the thirty-one notebooks. But halfway through 1958, the sight in her good eye began to deteriorate. She woke up one morning congested, feverish and half blind. Immediately she began cleaning the house, from top to bottom and from right to left. Curtains came down, and blankets and pillows were hurled from their sleeping mats. She polished ledges, scrubbed walls, emptied cabinets, sifted through the boys’ room and discovered pencil drawings of herself and Ba Lute, she fat as a pomelo and her husband tall as a leek. Underneath, in Flying Bear’s rangy writing were the words, yué qìn (moon guitar) and dí zi (flute). The little turds! They were already laughing at authority. She beat the quilts violently, thinking that Mencius himself would have pulled their ears, straightened their handwriting, and introduced some physical deprivation to their lives, but here she was, carrying the drawing in her pocket as if it were a treasured pack of Hatamen cigarettes. “Oh, Mother!” she cried, startling Sparrow who was bent over a sheaf of manuscript paper.