Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

His eyes had filled with tears, perhaps due to the dryness of the high plateau. She and the Translator gazed at him as if at an apparition. To their astonishment he withdrew a book from his bag, The Rain on Mount Ba , a classic novel.

“Zhuli asked me to give this to you, her favourite book.”

Swirl took it in her hands, confused. “But how can Zhuli be reading it already?”

“She’s eleven now,” Sparrow said, as if confused himself. With the rucksack emptied and hanging uselessly in his hand, he looked forlorn. He wanted to keep bringing things out, she thought, as if he could fill the desert with flowers.

The Translator lit cigarettes for each of them, and for a long time they simply sat in contemplative silence, smoking. Swirl tried to see the sky and the dormitories and the camp office though Sparrow’s eyes, but all she could do was glance at him, as if in a dream, and follow the smoke that curled out of his fingers.

“My mother is petitioning to have your conviction overturned,” he said. “She’s applied for permission to visit you and should be able to come within the month. Ba Lute says you mustn’t go back to Bingpai, you’ll live with us in Shanghai. Zhuli is such a gifted violinist, she never stops practising, the Conservatory will do anything to keep her.”

“But Sparrow…”

“My parents are still looking for Uncle Wen. I feel certain we’ll have news of him soon.”

“Sparrow,” Swirl said, taking his hand for the first time. She steadied her voice. “You must tell Big Mother that, when you found me, my only sadness was missing my family, my husband, my daughter. Nothing else. No suffering. You must thank them for me. You must tell Zhuli my life is good, the Party is re-educating me and I’ll succeed in correcting my mistakes. Make sure she thinks only of her future. She must not be troubled.”

“Of course, aunt.”

Sparrow suddenly remembered something in his pocket. He took out a photograph of Zhuli with her violin, and gave it to her. She had not seen her daughter’s face in more than four years. She stared at the image, as if into an unknown world.

“What is the famous poem?” the Translator said. “ Destined to arrive in a swirl of dust / and to rise inexorably like mist on the river . Your daughter looks like you. My dear Swirl, the child has your face.”

Why do I weep, she thought, trembling. I should be overjoyed. Her daughter had seemed forever lost to her, and yet here she was, so near and close at hand. Perhaps her husband existed like her, still accused of being a traitor and an enemy, and yet their destinies had merged a long time ago.

That afternoon, at the camp office, Swirl waited in the doorway, sheltered from the scorching sun, with Sparrow. The oil truck arrived, her nephew climbed up into the back and, as if it had always been so easy, he left Farm 835. He held firmly to one of the oil drums, gazing back as the distance between them grew, and she knew there was something he wished to say but couldn’t. She tried to imagine his departure: the camp office diminishing in size, and then other buildings that would arrive and also vanish, until Sparrow came to the rail line, the endless trains and faces in the windows. Daylight drained into the ground. She knew that, one day soon, without warning, the conviction against her would be overturned. Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labour, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep? Would she feel joy? She should feel grateful for the chance to return to life. Yet even as Swirl imagined Shanghai, she feared that only the wide open desert and the sky seemed to know her, that it would sharpen and forever expand.

ALL THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER Ai-ming and Ma drove away, I sat at the window reading Ma’s copy of David Copperfield . Again and again, I returned to the opening lines: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Around seven at night, Ma finally came home. I watched her walk across the inner courtyard and ascend the stairs, moving slowly as if the stairs grew invisibly steeper. Her green coat, delicate as a summer leaf, was so familiar to me, she’d had it since before I was born. I watched it rise through the stairwell, as if against the flow of time. Seeing me through the glass, she smiled and began to move faster. She was carrying a parcel in her hands, a small, white bakery box.

I ran to the door and opened it, pulling Ma inside.

I had prepared a meal of rice, cucumbers and hardboiled eggs; as we ate, Ma filled the silence by describing, in detail, how the day had unfolded. The border guard, yawning, had waved them through. On the outskirts of Seattle, they’d run into morning traffic. They’d stopped for hamburgers. Ai-ming had bought my favourite sponge cake, and sent it home with Ma in the white bakery box. Ma had waited until Ai-ming boarded the Greyhound, she’d watched the bus pull away and disappear.

After dinner, Ma telephoned Shanghai, speaking for over an hour with Ai-ming’s mother. I sat beside her on the sofa, near enough that her voice covered me.

In bed that night, I concentrated with all my strength, hoping I could hear my father’s voice if only I listened hard enough. Light and shadow slid across the ceiling, now here, now gone, and as I thought about the reasons Ba had left this world, sadness overwhelmed me. Yet the wind sounded against the windows and in the next room, Ma still breathed and changed and dreamed. I wanted to go to her, I wanted to find a way to protect her. Ai-ming had left me a letter which I picked up again:

“We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world / That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds joined wingtip to wingtip / And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree. / Earth endures, heaven endures, even though both shall end.”

Ai-ming was the link between us, my father and hers, my mother and me. Until we knew she was safe, how could we possibly let her go? At that time, I thought I never would.

“In the fall of 1965,” I told the windows, the room, the photograph of my father on the desk, “on the night before Sparrow’s twenty-fourth birthday, a young man, wearing an overcoat far too big for his skinny body, arrived in the night.”

THE HOUSEHOLD — BA LUTE, Big Mother and the two boys, Zhuli and Swirl (newly released, within days of her friend, the Translator) — was fast asleep, but Sparrow was still writing. Outside, a shadow appeared in the laneway. As Sparrow worked on his Symphony No. 3, he could hear the scratching of their steps, back and forth, around and back. The noise crept into his music: a low bassoon interfering with the bass line, now here, now gone.

Irritated, Sparrow set down his pencil. He picked up the lamp, descended the stairs and exited into the courtyard, listening: no sound at all. He flung open the back gate.

The stranger cried out, making them both fall sideways.

Embarrassed, Sparrow shook the lamp. “Speak, Comrade!” he said, as gruffly as he could. “How can I assist you!”

At first, only the wind replied. And then the stranger said, his voice no louder than a sigh, “I’m looking for Young Sparrow.”

He was very slight, very short and surely no one to be afraid of, but still the lamp in Sparrow’s hand trembled. “Young Sparrow? What do you want with him?”

In the stranger’s hand, a crumpled envelope appeared. Even in the low light, Sparrow knew the handwriting immediately. It was the very same calligraphy he had gazed at ever since he was a teenager: square yet full of ardour, telling the story of Da-wei and May Fourth. The stranger shivered miserably and yanked his hand back. He was nervous, but not in the smug, twitchy way of a spy or a jailer. Rather, the young man seemed horrified by the width of the alleyway.