Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

She decided not to practise after all and ran abruptly into the road, hopping into a passing tram decorated with a banner that said, “Protect Chairman Mao!” It was so crowded, it squeezed even her envy out, so that when she entered the laneway off Beijing Road, she felt fine and light. Arriving home, she crossed the inner courtyard and entered the kitchen so unassertively that she caught her mother in the act of pocketing a spoon. Startled, Swirl turned. A handful of dried mung beans showered to the ground. Zhuli went to the table, clapped a mosquito between her hands and pretended she had witnessed nothing.

“Ma,” she said, turning back, “I’m perfecting Ravel’s Tzigane. It’s incredibly difficult.”

“Ravel,” her mother said, pleased.

“Shall I play it for you soon?”

“Yes, my girl.” Her mother smiled and a few more beans clicked and clacked on the tiled floor.

Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday. She got a broom and quickly swept up the beans, rinsed them in the sink, and spread them to dry on a clean cloth.

“Ma,” she said, but her mother was now at the kitchen table. Zhuli went to her, wanting to ask forgiveness for the disrespectful thoughts in her head, but then she noticed the two travelling bags on the floor, and the papers, maps and notebooks on the table.

Zhuli picked up one of the notebooks, opened it and began to read. Her mother’s handwriting covered page after page: persistent, balanced, sharp. Zhuli recognized the story right away, Da-wei’s radio station in the desert, May Fourth’s journey into the western borderlands, and the great revolution that had overtaken their lives. The tantalizing, epic Book of Records.

“You’re making a new copy,” Zhuli said. “Ma?”

“I finally finished it this morning.”

Her mother drew a widening circle on the biggest map. “Your father’s camp was here,” Swirl said, “but if he returned to Gansu Province I think he would avoid this region…”

Zhuli could not follow her mother’s trajectories. They criss-crossed and overran one another like the interlacing of a bird’s nest.

“So I should begin my search here,” her mother concluded. And her fingertip came to rest on an open place.

Zhuli wanted to take her mother’s frail hand, lift it off the map, and hide it in her own. She wanted to take the map and burn it in the stove. “How would you do that?” she said quietly.

“Your aunt and I will go together. We travelled the length of this country when we were young.”

“It’s not the same as it was.”

“True. Back then, there was the war against Japan, famine, and then the Nationalists bombed the Yellow River and terrible flooding came…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Zhuli said. “The neighbourhood grandmas will talk and the public security men will break down the door again. They’ll say you’re siding with a convicted rightist. And then what?” She wanted to say, but did not, How can you even think of leaving me again? Don’t I matter? Isn’t there any part of you for me and not for him?

“Big Mother will be teaching a new model opera in Gansu Province,” Swirl said. “Since she’s leader of the Song and Dance Troupe, she arranged for me to accompany her. She already told the neighbours she’s going to handle my resurrection back into society. She told them that once I had lived in a Gansu mud hut for a few weeks, I would overcome the wrongs I committed and the idiocies of my youth.”

Her mother reached out, hesitantly, to touch the long ends of Zhuli’s hair. Her eyes were forthright and calm. “Foolish girl,” she said softly, teasingly. “I’ve already been to the sea and back. This is only a small journey.” Her mother’s grey shirt and pants were ironed and clean, proper and unassuming, but there was a look in her mother’s eyes that had nothing to do with propriety and obedience. There was no resignation, only a sharp knife in a pool of water. Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

“Ma,” Zhuli said, “please let me go with you.” Even as she said it, she knew she didn’t want to leave. “Big Mother can arrange it, can’t she?”

Her mother said nothing as if the thought itself was not worth hearing.

Instead, Swirl picked up the copy she had made of Chapter 17 of the Da-wei novel and began to ramble like the evening newsreader. She would make further copies of all the chapters, she said, each one bound into a separate notebook, thirty-one notebooks in all. But in each one, the text would be marginally altered, and the date of copying added. They would use the same code as the original author, folding locations and information into the names of Da-wei and May Fourth, clues meant only for Zhuli’s father, changes he would recognize immediately as not belonging to the original Book of Records.

“But what location?” Zhuli asked. “It’s too dangerous for him to come here.”

Her mother had thought of everything. The location belonged to a third party, the Lady Dostoevsky, who had been resurrected by the Party and was now living in Gansu Province, working for a plant and flower clinic.

“She has given the clinic a wondrous name,” her mother said. “She calls it Notes from the Underground. The idea suddenly came to me. I remembered how Da-wei sent messages to his lover over the radio broadcasts, through the public airwaves. Hiding in plain sight. Big Mother and I will keep making copies as we go, and we’ll scatter them all over the Northwest. She’s already used the Conservatory’s machine to make a dozen copies of Chapter 17, your father’s favourite chapter. Wen might go without food for five days, but he can’t resist the literature section of the bookshops. We added the date, you see? As soon as your father sees it, he’ll know the message wasn’t left by the author. The message could only have come from us.”

Zhuli put her arms around her mother. Her mother hugged her back but her arms were light as wings.

“When do you leave, Ma?” she asked.

“Tomorrow morning.”

She gripped her mother tighter. She remembered the little house they’d had in Bingpai, and the hidden, underground cavern, filled with books and musical instruments. She had climbed down into it as if into a magic kingdom and, in doing so, altered her parents’ lives forever. Did such caverns still exist, she wondered. If she found another, would she enter it again?

Her mother’s eyes flashed an unnerving light, part anger, part madness, part love. “Zhuli, be careful what you say and whom you trust. No one is immune. Everyone thinks that with one betrayal they can save themselves and everyone they love.” She looked down at the map again as if it, and not this room, this city, was the real world. “Think only of your studies. Don’t write to me, don’t be distracted. Promise me you won’t take any risks. Concentrate on your music.”

—

As Zhuli was on her way out again, Big Mother Knife was in the midst of winnowing through clothes, dried fruit, sewing needles, sleeping mats, various washcloths, a cooking pot and a collection of knives, trying to fit them into Ba Lute’s army rucksacks. “I’d rather have this cleaver than this pair of trousers,” Big Mother said thoughtfully, holding both items up for display.

“I’d rather you had the trousers,” Swirl said. “Come, tuck the cleaver into my quilt…”