Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Your friend,

Comrade “Bach”

P.S. I have found a further chapter of our Book of Records.

It came into my hands in the most unlikely of places, after my transfer from J—.

P.P.S. If ever the chance presents itself, seek out Comrade Glass Eye in the Village of Cats and do present a copy of the Book of Records to him. He was my companion at J — and his preferred composer is Schönberg. Tell him you are well acquainted with his childhood friends, the adventurer, Da-wei, and the fearless May Fourth.

Three days passed before officers from the Public Security Bureau showed up at the door. Like the destitute stranger, the officers came early in the morning, before breakfast was even on the table. Unlike him, they banged on the laneway gate and bullied their way in. They said that the “counter-revolutionary, criminal, rightist, political pollutant”…and here they had to pause and search through their papers…“Comrade Wen!”…had escaped, critically injuring two army officers. They accused Ba Lute of harbouring an enemy of the state.

Ba Lute listened calmly, but when the two officers announced that Swirl and Zhuli must come immediately for questioning, he leaped forward, flinging down the draft of Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3 that happened to be in his hands. “How dare you shame me in my own house!” he shouted. He began rampaging through the rooms. “Come over here! Is Comrade Wen under the bed? Is he in the closet? Did we use his corpse to fuel the stove? Check the garbage pail, shit house and laundry bag!” He hurled objects across the room as the security officers, pale and unconditioned, knocked each other down in their haste to escape the careening objects of Ba Lute. Sparrow’s father was taller than ever but only half as round, and therefore twice as intimidating. “Comrade Wen has the aggression of a falling leaf! How did he injure two officers? The way a drop of rain injures the pavement? Who’s selling potatoes here?”

“Uncle—” Zhuli said.

“Have you lost your mind?” Big Mother Knife said calmly.

“I’ve had enough!” Ba Lute shouted. “You’ve wrongly imprisoned his wife! That’s right! Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu! Check the records yourselves, she’s been resurrected! She’s working for the Party now and she’s probably ranked higher than you are! You little shits have stained our Revolution and one day I’m going to haul you before Chen Yi himself and have him whip your balls. Donkeys! Do you have any clue who I am?”

Mrs. Ma was summoned and she sternly informed the officers that she was the head of the residential committee, and there were absolutely no escaped rightists in her jurisdiction. The very thought, she murmured, was appalling. Everyone here had their papers and household registration in order, they could be sure of that. She tossed her sleek head and offered to escort the officers outside.

Beside the door, Sparrow said nothing. The pages of his symphony, flung aside by Ba Lute, had shoe prints on them. He went to gather them up.

Only when the officers were gone did Swirl turn to Big Mother. “Did they say that Wen escaped?”

“Yes,” she said. Her better eye moistened and she turned away to gauge the destruction that had befallen her house.

“But how?” Swirl said, sitting down. “Where could he go?”

Ba Lute blustered back into the room, yelling, “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what have I done?” Sparrow hustled his younger brothers into the kitchen, distracting them with little sugar pyramids and a quick game of Watching the Tiger, and then he went to the balcony and peered into the can that held the ashes of Wen the Dreamer’s letter. There were a dozen ends of cigarettes, a thick wad of tobacco but not a trace of the page, the writing or the words. Sparrow looked over the railing. In the laneway, the two officers were deep in agitated conversation. Mrs. Ma was firmly shaking her head. Waste water from the gutter circled their feet.

The letter had disappeared for good, Sparrow thought. It had dissolved into the air itself, escaped to where no officer, spy or committee chairman could ever retrieve it. At the first opportunity, when no one else was around, he would tell Aunt Swirl what Wen the Dreamer had written.

—

Sparrow left with Zhuli, his cousin clutching her violin case in both arms, walking with one foot narrowly in front of the other as if she regretted every inch of space she inhabited. Against the grey-blue wave of oncoming pedestrians, Sparrow wanted to clear a path for her and so he walked with his chest out and his slender arms swinging, deluding himself that he was a tank and not a paper boat. But nobody, not even schoolchildren, moved aside for him. Bicycles whizzed so close their handlebars clipped his elbows. How unlike Ba Lute he was. Given his father’s heft, Sparrow felt soft, flimsy and inessential.

The tram arrived. Zhuli turned and smiled distractedly back at him before the rippling blue of her dress disappeared among the other passengers. They did not meet up again until the gates of the Conservatory, where she called down to him from above. Zhuli was balanced gracefully on a concrete ledge, one hand hooked around the iron fence, the rest of her body tipped to the side. Her hair, gathered into a long braid, sat on her shoulder and the ends seemed alive in the breeze. Inside the gates, the pianist Yin Chai, the brightest star of the Conservatory and admittedly appealing in army-style shirt and trousers, was sitting on a bench. He had returned from Moscow after taking second place in the Tchaikovsky competition and everywhere he went, or so it seemed to Sparrow, a flood of stage lights followed him.

“What do you think, cousin?” Zhuli said, making a soft landing beside him.

The chatter of the students drummed at him like a headache. He smiled to hide his envy and fell back on a cliché, “ ‘Can the sparrow and swallow know the will of the great swan?’ Yin Chai is a national treasure.”

“I prefer your compositions to his melodrama.”

“Do you?” Sparrow said, unable to believe it. Yet when his cousin played his work, it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.

He told Zhuli he would come find her in Room 103, her preferred practice room, and then dodged the crowd and climbed the imposing staircase. On the ground floor, all five hundred of the Conservatory’s pianos seemed to be singing and feuding together. He skirted Room 204 with its gongs and cymbals, 313 with its many-stringed zithers, and the violin-making workshops of 320. On the fourth floor, he glanced past an open door and saw the President of the Conservatory, He Luting, deep in conversation with a cadre Sparrow didn’t recognize. “That’s your decision,” He Luting was saying, “but exactly what constitutes a crime these days?” President He was famously blunt. Occasionally he invited Sparrow to his home to drink lemonade, listen to records and read over his compositions. The whole Conservatory knew that, when He Luting was a child, his elder brother had owned a French music text, and the book so enthralled Comrade He that, at night, he would sneak downstairs and copy it out by hand. Fascinated by the construction of Western music, he taught himself staff notation. When he finally became a Conservatory student in the 1920s, he was famous for falling out of bed with his hands still moving in the air. Sparrow longed to know what He Luting had been playing in his dreams. Had he been performing or composing? Had he been dreaming of his teacher, Huang Zi, who had himself studied under Paul Hindemith? Could dreams shed light on the architecture of the music in his head? Sparrow, too, dreamed all the time of things he had not written. Each morning when he woke, he heard these pieces like a vanishing noise in the street, and he wanted to weep over the music he had lost.