Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart. Maybe, like Sparrow, Kai was terrified that one day the sound would shut off, his mind would go mute, and all the notes would disappear. Dear Kai. Ah, she thought, quickly correcting herself, the word “dear” was stupid with sentimentality and had been struck from permissible usage. What should she call him then? Her eyes threatened to fill. Jiang Kai was so much like her and yet…in the dramatic flashing of his hands, he played every note as if it belonged to him alone. He was all capriciousness and beauty and sophisticated performance; she thought he would be better suited to the hot-headed genius of Beethoven or Rachmaninoff or even the modernist high-rises of Stravinsky. Bach, she’d always thought, was a coded man, a strange fish, a composer who loved God and devoted himself to the numeric order of the world, but whose heart was fragmented. He existed outside of time. One day, Kai would play Bach with all the ardour that the composer called forth, but not yet. Kai was still too young, too certain.

At her insistence, Sparrow played the first movement of his unfinished Symphony No. 3 while she and Kai leaned against the wall. The opening slid from the key of E-flat major to an unexpectedly luminous B minor. She heard atonality etched into a falsely harmonious surface, she heard brittle ruptures and time speeding up like a wheel spinning ever faster. For all her talent, and for all of Kai’s, it was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift. His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

While others in the Conservatory gave poetic names to their work (“Young Soldier’s Joy” or “Thirty Miles to the Courier Station”) Sparrow, as usual, gave only a number. Yet Zhuli imagined she could hear her father’s presence in the music just as clearly as if Wen the Dreamer’s name was written on the page. Could his name be written there in secret? Bach, for instance, had encrypted the four letters of his name into a single motif. These four notes, where in the German system B is B-flat and H is B-natural, served as his signature, surfacing through the music. And hadn’t Schumann encoded the town where his lover was born? It would be just like her cousin to speak without speaking. Zhuli’s left hand was playing an invisible violin, and when she noticed herself doing this, she abruptly stopped. Still, she heard a recurring pattern inside Sparrow’s new work, as if they were the very footsteps of Wen the Dreamer. At night, her father walked across her own dreams, too. Since escaping the camp, where could he possibly hide? Last month, Zhuli had overheard her mother saying that the bodies of those who died in the desert camps were left to decompose in the sand dunes. Scientists and teachers, longtime Party members, doctors, soldiers, paper-pushers and engineers, more than enough to build a better China in the underworld.

“Careful. Even ghosts are illegal here,” Big Mother had said.

“The lie is too big. I can’t pretend, I don’t wish to.”

Big Mother Knife said that another purge was coming, there were rumours in her unit.

“I’m a stupid fool,” Swirl said. “I was a fool.”

In what way had she been a fool, Zhuli wondered. What did she mean?

Big Mother had dissolved the melancholy with a long, rumbling burp. “If you can’t pretend to be a Communist, the only answer is—”

Abruptly, Sparrow stopped playing. “It’s unfinished,” he said. “I can’t go on.”

“But it’s extraordinary,” Kai exclaimed. “It’s your masterpiece.”

Blushing, Sparrow handed Zhuli her violin. “It’s nothing,” he said.

To banish the awkwardness in the room, she chose Ysaye’s sonata in the dubious E minor key. She envied the composer’s intellect, the observant compassion that Sparrow possessed, and wished to cultivate it within herself, but it was impossible. She was a performer, a transparent glass giving shape to water, nothing more than a glass. When the sonata ended, Kai leaped up and rushed from the room. “Some people really don’t like E minor,” Zhuli murmured.

“Perhaps he has an assignation.”

It was late, almost midnight. “I don’t think that our pianist has a lover.”

Sparrow looked faint.

To bring the colour back to his face, she reminded him that his mother and hers were packing their bags, they were leaving for the hinterlands of Gansu. “It’s better for Aunt Swirl. Shanghai is uneasy right now,” he said.

“Why?”

He didn’t answer. Zhuli wanted to ask him about fear because this unease inside of her, it too was a kind of desertification, a kind of hunger, and where would it end? It was cutting a fault line, running all the way to her hands.

But at that moment, Kai returned. “The Professor brought food for us,” Kai said, holding up three helpings of noodles, three wheat buns and, stunningly, a small jar of wine. Zhuli had no idea who the Professor was but decided it didn’t matter. Her stomach was rumbling. The melancholy in her cousin’s eyes vanished as if it had never been.

Kai said some students had returned from demonstrating, but the streets were calm. Calm for you, Zhuli thought. Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds, they were Sons of the Soil, Sons of Revolutionary Heroes, Sons of…she laughed and drank the wine. Her cousin’s face was hazy with joy.

She and Kai squeezed together on the bench. The alcohol made her thoughts light and immodest and she decided to climb up on the bench and salute her cousin. Kai wrapped an arm around her legs to prevent her from toppling over, and the pressure of his hands made Zhuli want to push him away and yet also collapse into his arms. “Cousin Sparrow!” she proclaimed. “Twice my age—”

“So old?” he protested.

“—but my best friend in all the world! I shall stand beside you when the flood comes!”

“May the flood bypass us all, sweet Zhuli,” Sparrow said.

“May the flood lift us to better shores,” Kai said.

Zhuli was the first to give in to exhaustion. She left them. Outside the practice room, she stood listening for a few moments, waiting for the music or voices to start up again, but there was nothing.

—

And yet, early the next morning, when the Conservatory was still quiet, here he was, just as he had promised: dear Kai, that exhausted performer, half draped over the piano as if over the arm of an old friend.

“You’re late, Comrade Zhuli,” he said.

“Did you sleep here?”

“With my eyes open and a pen in my hand.”

“Writing self-criticisms, I’m sure.”

He smiled. How tired he looked, and yet electrified, as if he had just emerged from a ten-hour seminar with Glenn Gould himself. “The truth is,” he said, “I’d never even heard Tzigane . I came early in order to practise it. I feared you would drop me from your concert and perform with Yin Chai instead.”

“So you’ve mastered it.”

There it was again: the proud shine in his eyes. “Of course.”

After playing it through once, they sat facing one another cross-legged on the floor. “Did you listen to the Oistrakh recording?” she asked him.

“A dozen times. I found it eerie and couldn’t stop…I also listened to Heifetz and Neveu.”

“Professor Tan told me to think about it alongside Gounod’s Faust,” Zhuli said. “You know, ‘All that you desire, I can give you.’ Selling your soul to the evil spirits. The usual thing.” Tan had said that the violin score of Tzigane was devilishly difficult. Perfect, she had thought.