Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Big Mother started singing a verse from “How the North Wind Blows,” interspersing bawdy words, and Swirl laughed and said, “Cover your ears, Zhuli!”

“Or add your own verse!” her aunt said, and the two sisters giggled and folded the clothing into smaller and smaller squares.

Da Shan had come home from school and was lying on the sofa with Chairman Mao’s guerrilla warfare essays on his stomach. “Take me with you,” he said. “I’ll be your pack horse.”

“If I gave you two grapes,” his mother said scornfully, “it would break your back.”

Da Shan sighed. “Why so hard, Mama?” he said and Big Mother turned, the trousers dangling from her fingertips. Her face softened and Da Shan sat up, took the trousers, folded them and rolled them up and handed them back to her. “You’ll need these, Mama,” he said, and smiled.

—

Zhuli clutched her violin and turned in the direction of the Conservatory. The spring sky was a haze of pink and grey. She walked slowly, listening to the scores in her bag rustling like kept creatures, wondering if Kai would come to see her in Room 103, or if instead she would find Yin Chai and Her Royal Biscuit huddled indecently together. Apparently Biscuit and Old Wu had broken up. But maybe, if she was lucky, the practice rooms would be completely still. Once or twice now, she’d had nightmares of standing up on stage before a thousand people, the eternally sleepless faces of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi gazing down on her from the walls, but when she set bow to strings, the first notes of Tzigane refused to sound. The audience grew restless. They laughed as she tried to restring her violin, jeered as she replaced her bow, deafened her with abuse, but no matter what she did, her violin would not play.

“Stage fright,” Sparrow had told her. “It’s normal to feel anxiety.” The Conservatory had set the date for Zhuli’s next solo concert, mid-October, a few days after her fifteenth birthday. She had wanted to play Bach or her beloved Prokofiev, but Teacher Tan would not hear of it. He wanted her to aim for the next Tchaikovsky Competition, four years away. “The Ravel is a better preparation, unless you prefer Paganini’s Caprice No. 24.”

“I’m the daughter of a convicted rightist, Teacher. I won’t be allowed to compete abroad.”

His eyes gave nothing away. “We must have faith in the Party. And you, too, must do your part.”

But two nights ago, Kai had told her that some, if not all, of these opportunities — competitions, scholarships — would be withdrawn. The Conservatory had been unusually quiet that night. It had been so hot, perhaps everyone had fled. “One day soon,” Kai joked, “we’ll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked.” His next solo concert had also been scheduled for October.

“If it weren’t for Ba Lute, they would never have accepted me into the Conservatory at all,” she said. “I fully expect to be transferred to an agricultural college in Shandong Province.”

“All the more reason to try to go abroad.”

She played a few measures of the Ravel. “Your father is a Party member, of course.”

“A pure seed of the earth. A peasant who played the bamboo flute and joined the Revolution so early, even our Great Helmsman didn’t know there was one.”

He liked to shock her. She refused to laugh. “I don’t believe anything you say, Kai.”

He took her hand and held it. “I’m glad, Zhuli. Never trust me.” He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to her cheek and then to her lips. The warmth of his mouth humiliated her, she turned her face but he kept holding on to her hand, the heat of his breath against her ear. Just at the moment when she wanted to give in, to kiss him fiercely, he had released her fingers. “Do what the old violinist says,” Kai told her. He continued as if nothing unusual had occurred. “Play the Ravel. I can do the accompaniment, if you wish.”

“Fine,” she said. She was trembling. He had switched gears as smoothly as a bird circling, as unequivocally as a madman. “Since you like it so much.”

When he left, she had picked up her violin again. How had he dared? But a giddy, shameful pleasure had swelled inside her. Why had she allowed him?

Now she reached the stone gates of the Conservatory where hundreds of students were milling about the courtyard, reminding her of a fire crackling. Zhuli went straight to her political study class, she was nearly an hour early but still she was the last to take her seat. One of her classmates, wearing a crimson armband, made a show of taking down her name. The girl, also a violinist, was sincerely single-minded. Last summer, she had been one of the students sent out to the countryside. He Luting had refused to stop classes, and so only a limited number, the children of cadres, had been permitted to go. Most of them, including Kai, had lived in the barest shelters. Some of them had clearly never touched dirt before but, still, they came back as heroes.

Back at the Conservatory, they showed their newfound knowledge by continuously questioning their teachers, their parents and music itself. “We must take responsibility for our minds!” this girl had proclaimed. “To change our consciousness, we must change our conditions!” The teacher was barred from the room. Zhuli and her classmates wrote essays on discarded newspapers and butcher paper and pasted them up on the north wall. “Are we gifted?” the essays asked. “If so, who cares?” “What good is this music, these empty enchantments, that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?” “If it is beauty against ugliness, then choose ugliness!” “Comrades, the Revolution depends on us!”

Now the class turned their attention to the playwright, Wu, and the poet, Guo. Both men, once celebrated, had been discovered to be enemies of the People.

“Guo claims he hasn’t studied Mao Zedong thought properly, he says we should burn all his books, he claims he is reformed but we know him, Comrades, don’t we? The snake lies. How long has he been a Party member? How long has he been a hidden traitor?”

“And yet the authorities do nothing!”

“We women must be at the forefront of violent class struggle, we must make it our nature. Nobody can struggle for you. Nobody can wash your face for you! Revolution is not just writing an essay or playing ‘Song of the Guerrillas’…”

“Exactly, the older generation used the Revolution to protect their status. They’ve betrayed us.”

The students began offering criticisms of themselves and each other, and the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favouring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!” Had she been critical enough, too critical? Their faces, their gestures, their eyes were cold. They knew that, in the moment of speaking, she believed what she said, but as soon as class ended, clarity fell apart. All her thoughts kept intruding on each other.

By the end of the study session, her hands sat on her knees like stones. Standing, she could feel her dress glued with sweat to her back and legs. Embarrassed, she sat down again, dropped her eyes and busied herself with her books.

After the class had disbanded, she wandered up one hallway and down the other, arriving at Room 103 as if at the home of a confidant. She found Kai there with her cousin. Sparrow was leaning against the far wall and when he lifted his rapt face and smiled at her, she thought his eyes had the saddest light. Kai grinned at her. She closed the door behind her and felt as if she had stepped into outer space. Bach’s Goldberg Variation No. 21 gave way to a joyous, bold and imperious No. 22. Kai played as if he were juggling a dozen silver knives, and all the edges flickered and shone.