Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Sparrow tried to think of an escape route. He wanted to be alone with the window, the papers on his desk, and the freedom of his thoughts.

“An hour,” Zhuli said. “Steal an hour from your life and give it to us.”

She smiled at him, a smile as big and openhearted as Aunt Swirl’s when he was a child, and so he did.

—

In the park, Zhuli and the pianist walked on either side of him, as if afraid Sparrow would make a run for it. What do the sparrow and the swallow know, he thought again, of the ways of swans? There was a swan, as it happened, in the shade of the pond, fluffing her grey-white wings, trying to appear larger and more deadly than she was. He heard the softness of her trilling.

“The room I live in,” the pianist was saying, “is the size of one and a half men lying down. I have just enough space to turn over and back again.”

Zhuli’s violin case swung as she walked. “How come you don’t board at the Conservatory? Maybe you prefer sleeping in a cave.”

“I had to pull all sorts of strings to get this terrible room, but it’s near my stepfather. He was ill last year…anyway, the mice are good company.”

Zhuli ducked under a low branch. “Be careful or the mice will multiply and take over the cat’s room.”

When Kai laughed, his hair stood upright in the wind.

Without Sparrow’s noticing the transition, Zhuli was telling the pianist about Ba Lute and the confrontation with the public security officers this morning. The pianist’s walk slowed. “What camp was your father at again?” he said.

“I don’t know. But it’s in Gansu Province, isn’t it, cousin?”

“I’m not sure, Zhuli.”

She tensed. Faint perspiration gleamed on her forehead and her cheeks. She looked as if she could take on any campaign, criticism or family member, and leave them battered on the floor.

“You don’t have to worry about me, cousin,” she said, her voice low. “I know when to keep my mouth shut. If only you could hear me in our political study class. I think I’ve memorized more slogans than the Premier himself.” She lifted her chin defiantly. Her recklessness, her casualness with words, stunned him. His cousin had been this way ever since Swirl’s return.

But perhaps, he thought, this bravado was not for him but for Kai.

The sun touched everything now. They attempted to find refuge on a bench under a flowering pear tree. They sat as if they were alone and self-contained, the joy of only a few minutes ago dissolving. Perhaps it was the heat that made them quiet. Nobody stood nearby yet Sparrow felt the weight of someone, or some attentive presence. There was shouting in the distance, or maybe laughing.

“This morning,” Kai said, his voice barely audible, “the President of the Conservatory was in the newspapers. Did you read it? Liberation Daily has a full page on him. Wen Hui Bao , too. They say He Luting is anti-Party and anti-socialist, and that the most damaging accusations are coming from inside the Conservatory.”

“I thought you were practising all morning,” Zhuli said.

Kai paused. “I think that half my life might be spent running from one position to another until I trip and make a fatal mistake.”

“Have you been to Wuhan?” Sparrow asked, wanting to change the subject. He knew He Luting was under investigation, of course, but Kai’s words still chilled him.

“Forgive me, Teacher. I’m only a student and yet I feel that I can be very free with you. What did you ask me?”

“Would you like to go to Wuhan?”

“With you,” the pianist said.

“Yes. If you have time to spare during the break. The journey and my research would need three or four days, perhaps longer. I’m looking for an assistant, I’ve been commissioned by the Conservatory to gather—”

“Yes,” the pianist said.

“But I haven’t told you why.”

“I’ll go.”

Zhuli was hugging her violin case to her chest as if it concealed her. She refused to be a child and demand to go with them. She had her mother to think of, too. One day soon, she thought, she would play for her father, whose face she no longer recalled, but who used to sing, “Little girl, where are you going? Tell your father and he will take you. Tell your father and he will find a map, bring the tea, make the sun lift, and string the trees along the road.” Was it a poem, a story, or something he had composed? “Zhuli,” he would say, “little dreamer.” She let go of his voice and heard Ravel, the song itself, and her shoes scratching the pebbles each time she shifted her weight. She could see the light and the park and her cousin and Kai, but these pictures were only tenuously connected to the sound of the violin in her head. She heard it on waking and she knew it continued relentlessly through her sleeping hours; she, herself, came and went, not truly real, but the music had no beginning, it persisted, whether she was there or not, awake or not, aware or sleeping. She had accepted it all her life, but lately, she had begun to wonder what purpose it served. Prokofiev, Bach and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation and Chairman Mao occupied for others. Why was this? How had she had been made differently? After her parents had been taken away from Bingpai, she had been cut into an entirely different person.

There was a man limping across the park, one hand holding a rip in his shirt, as if this unsightliness bothered him more than the blood that ran down his face. People stared as he passed but no one spoke. Instead, a cold ring of quiet seemed to expand around this injured stranger, like water filling a plastic bag.

—

Zhuli walked back to the Conservatory alone. Her cousin and Jiang Kai had gone ahead, the two of them serious as Soviet spies, leaning towards one another, the pianist’s hand on the small of Sparrow’s back, the place, she knew, Sparrow had sustained an injury. He worked on his compositions for eighteen hours a day. Often, she came home from the Conservatory to find him lying on the floor of his closet room, in terrible pain. She would massage the spasms in his back and scold him for working too hard. It was as if Sparrow feared all the music inside him would be shut off, like a tap gone dry. But, honestly, who had ever heard of a Sparrow without music?

Ahead of her, Kai turned, lifted one eyebrow and grinned at her. The pianist had the same open, honest smile as Premier Zhou Enlai. She imagined the coffin-sized room he lived in, the rough floors and rodents, and wondered how Kai had ever managed to learn piano if he had grown up in a destitute village outside of Changsha. What kind of strings could a village boy pull? The pianist was a bag of tricks, she concluded. He wore his rural background well, like a penny novel wrapped inside an elegant cover. When not smiling, though, he had a face that could only be described as vigilant.

Her violin case swung with the rhythm of her steps. A procession of carts passed, each one weighed down with oil drums, the drivers sweating ferociously as if they were pedalling up Mount Ba itself. At the corner of Huaihai Road, she saw Conservatory students fluttering around Yin Chai, who had the glazed expression of someone who had withstood hours of adoration. The prettiest one, Biscuit, carried a trophy of flowers. Empress Biscuit detached herself from the group, came over, and overwhelmed Zhuli with revolutionary slogans, inside of which was posed, like a bee sting, the line, I saw you leaving with handsome Jiang Kai! Zhuli blinked and said, “The sun of Mao Zedong gives new fervour to my music!” and clutched her violin to her chest. Biscuit looked at her knowingly. The beauty queen would never be a great violinist, Zhuli thought, side-stepping Biscuit’s velvety hair which curled in long arabesques against the wind. She hid the moon and shamed the flowers, as the poets said, but she played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.