Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Each day, the darkness fell fast. Black was the colour of the northern sky and therefore the heavens, the colour of the oceans, of everything profound and necessary, and so it must contain the life she was trying to reach. Her hands trembled all the time. On upholding her sentence, the head of the Bingpai revolutionary committee had assessed her coldly. He had concluded, “Deep in your heart you oppose the Communist Party.” Swirl had denied the accusation, but if hadn’t been true then, surely it was true now. Maybe her crime had been as simple as the inability to believe. In truth, since the age of fourteen, and until she met Wen, she had believed in almost nothing.

—

The life of a prisoner is one of endless motion. She was moved here and there, like a sack of goods. Dig ditches, mill flour, tend the pigs, grow vegetables, reform your thoughts, love the Party, collect firewood, denounce others, wash the grain, sing a song. The district leader, so sure she would be resurrected back to society, eventually committed suicide. The economist, adamant that the universe had forgotten them, was the first to be released. Day followed night, until Swirl suspected the Party itself no longer knew her whereabouts. No letters arrived and no word from Wen; she remembered sitting at the teahouse, waiting for instalments that would never come. The doctor told them of a camp not far away where a woman, who had been pregnant when she was sentenced, had given birth and the little boy had become the joy of the women’s dormitory; the story seemed impossible. How could a mother and infant survive in these conditions? Swirl dreamed of Big Mother and for days, consoled herself with childhood. In a dream, she sat beside her lost son, her parents, Wen, Zhuli. They talked about everything and then, when time ran out, they returned her to the dormitory, fitting her back like a book on a shelf.

Her one friend was the translator of Russian literature, and Swirl loved her. She would have given her the last fen in her pocket, the last piece of bread. The friend, quite famous, was the premier translator of the works of Dostoevsky.

On the long bed, the Translator had been the first to volunteer her story.

“It was during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. They told us to criticize the Party, the university, each other, even the quality of our lunches and the functioning of the toilets.” The Translator turned over and so did all the women, one after another, like waves against the shore. “So I, the idiot, stepped forward and said that my request for permission to travel to Leningrad had been denied fourteen times, and that a scholar of my standing must engage with her contemporaries. While I carried on, everyone else ran for higher ground.

“What I later wondered,” the Translator said, laying an index finger gently on her own nose, “was how I could have studied Dostoevsky so keenly and not realized I was digging my own grave?” The word, Dostoevsky, made up of eight different ideograms, made them all murmur in admiration. “My old mother thinks I’ve been assigned to a university in Harbin. She’ll fall to heaven’s gate if she learns the truth.” The Translator thumped the bed with her hand, as if to chase away a ghost.

“We must not lose hope! Chairman Mao is a good man. He knows our qualities and he will rescue us.” The Translator pressed one hand to her heart as if to keep it from breaking. An echo of agreement rolled from woman to woman. “How can it be otherwise?”

—

There came a period of time when there was no food. These were months of desperation. Even labour was halted. The camp director agreed that energy would be better spent seeking wild grasses or roots. Famine was devastating the province; to give a single grain of millet to convicts would surely be a counter-revolutionary crime. Swirl had the sensation of pages fluttering before her eyes. It was the Translator, fanning her. She had the sensation of being rolled down a hallway. It was the Translator massaging her arms and legs. She dreamed she was eating a succulent duck leg. It was the Translator, who had stolen a handful of beans from the kitchen of the camp director, cooked them illicitly and fed them to her. She listened as someone read aloud from the Book of Records. It wasn’t real. It was the Translator holding her hand. Confused, Swirl asked, “Who will come to rescue us?”

The Translator said, with a small smile, “No one. So be it.”

At the end of the famine, there were only three left on their long bed: the Translator, the tax lawyer and Swirl. They slept curled together for warmth. The rest — the doctor, public security officer, schoolteacher and district leader — had gone, as the saying went, into the pure white sky, into the western heavens.

—

In 1963, the tax lawyer was released and Swirl and the Translator were transferred to a camp called Farm 835. For the first time, they were allowed to receive mail. Swirl was greeted with two envelopes of letters — from Big Mother and family, and from Zhuli — packets so thick they took up half her sleeping mat. She savoured one each day, as if each was a bowl of rice. The translator, alone in the world, had received nothing.

One day, they were preparing the Translator’s coat for winter, sewing layers of cotton batting into the lining. The Translator was sitting with her eyes closed. She had a washcloth resting on her feet in place of shoes.

A voice called out to them.

Swirl glanced up to see one of the guards beside a stranger, a visitor from an alien world. The stranger, a city person, wore blue slacks and a blue coat filmed in dust. The longer she looked at him, the more he seemed like a sign on the road, blurred and far away, difficult to read. He was tall and slender, handsome, perhaps in his early twenties.

“Aunt Swirl—”

She stared. The guard looked at her curiously. He said something to the young man, then turned and walked away, leaving the young man by himself.

“You know me, don’t you, Aunt Swirl?”

Her voice didn’t work. She tried again, but the words came out strangely. “Little Sparrow.”

The Translator opened her eyes. “A handsome gentleman, to be sure. But Comrade Swirl, this bird is not so little.”

He was standing before them now. Setting aside the coat and batting, Swirl got to her feet. She had to hold the Translator’s shoulder for support.

“Sparrow,” she said. “How strange it is to see you. This…” She shook her head to clear it. “This is my friend, the Lady Dostoevsky.”

“A pleasure to know you, Comrade!”

“Isn’t it though! Well, come nearer and let us have a look at you…”

Swirl wanted to reassure him but all the words within reach seemed too thin, too airy.

The high dome of the air swallowed their voices. “How did you arrive? There’s no transport for miles.”

“By train and bus. After Lanzhou, a donkey cart picked me up. For the last two days, we saw no one.”

The boy, but he was no longer a boy, looked overwhelmed. It was her, Swirl realized suddenly. She must be quite unrecognizable, and her appearance had upset him. She felt ashamed even though she knew that it had nothing to do with shame, only time and circumstances, and her powerlessness to change them. She was touched that he made light of the considerable journey from Shanghai, five full days of travel at least.

Sparrow began unpacking cartons of cigarettes, biscuits, rice, dried fish, salt, preserved vegetables, and box after box of soft sorghum candy.

The abundance was so unnerving, the Translator let out a soft curse. She leaned sideways. “So this is the nephew, eh? The composer destined to become the Beethoven of the Huangpu River? Are you sure that’s what he does?”

Perhaps out of embarrassment or panic Sparrow tried to surround them with words. He said everyone was well, that Zhuli was thriving. He said he was writing music, that his Symphony No. 2 was inspired by their journey across China during the war years, the tea houses and blind musicians…He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?