Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Kai nodded and made illegible, floating marks on his score. “The piano part is mysterious, isn’t it?” He turned a few pages. “First, it enters late. Second, I find it cold. See how it never loses control and is never out of breath? And yet I feel there’s a great hunger here. It wants to control things. To push the violin closer to the edge, maybe.”

It was true. In the last third, the violin spun in faster and faster, nearly impossible, circles. She said aloud, without thinking, “Not love then, but something like it.”

She and Kai played the piece again and the incompatibility between the two instruments heightened, like a dance between two lovers who had long since ruined one another and yet moved forward in the same maddening steps. It doesn’t end well, thought Zhuli, reaching for the notes, her back pinched, her neck aching. She was the devil playing. The walls of Room 103 danced sideways and seemed to give way to her, as if she had become the rain and torrent.

The music ended. She sat down at the piano and stared at the keys. Kai took up her hands which were hot and damp. She hated it when people touched her hands, they were sensitive and in constant pain, and she’d had dreams in which they were crushed or cut open. As if he could read her thoughts, he let them go, picked up his pencil and tapped the score. “You see more in each measure than any violinist at the Conservatory.”

“The Conservatory is a tiny corner of the world.” She took the pencil from him, flipped to the meno vivo and said: “Here is where I stumbled. Fatally. Let’s go back once more.”

His hand floated down her back.

She moved to stand up, but his hand was around her waist.

“Zhuli.” His voice was too near to her, his mouth pressed against her hair. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

She wasn’t afraid. Only, she thought, letting his mouth find hers, there are too many people, too many words, too many things that I wish for. I have the feeling there is too little time. They kissed. She didn’t know that she was still upright, she felt as if she had lain down on the floor of the room.

She pulled away and stood up and went to her violin as if nothing had happened, proud that she could be as uncaring as him, and tested the first bars of Tzigane . Her mind felt resolute and numb, but her heart was exhilarated. Kai was smiling at her. What did he feel, she wondered. Deep down, in that secret part of him, was there anyone he really trusted? She willed herself to disappear into Ravel. She let herself go, into the walls and into sound itself.

WITHOUT OUR REALIZING IT, the weeks following Ai-ming’s departure became months, and the months years.

On May 18, 1996, I was watching television and attempting to solve a hard problem (“Let D be a positive integer that is not a perfect square. Prove that the continued fraction of √D is periodic”) when the telephone rang. Ai-ming’s voice was miraculously clear, as if all that was required of me was to reach out my hand and pull her into the room. I was overjoyed. It had been a month since her last letter and Ma and I were expecting good news: after five long years, the rumoured amnesty had finally materialized and Ai-ming, along with nearly half a million others, had submitted her application for permanent residence in the United States.

“Ma-li,” she said, “I called to wish you happy birthday.”

I had just turned seventeen. Ai-ming rained questions on me — about Ma, math camp, my plans for university, our lives — but I ignored her. “What happened to your application? Did they schedule your interview?”

“No…nothing yet.”

I told her to give me her number, to hang up so that I could call her back.

“Oh no, don’t bother,” Ai-ming said. “These phone cards are so cheap. Just a penny a minute.”

She had a hint of New York in her English now, a tension that hadn’t been there before. In both San Francisco and New York, she’d been working different jobs — waitress, house cleaner, nanny, tutor. At first, in the newness of America, her letters had glimmered with observations, jokes and stories. Ma and I had visited her twice in San Francisco where, despite everything, she had seemed happy. But after she moved to New York in 1993 we didn’t see her anymore. Ai-ming always said it wasn’t the right time — she was living in a dormitory and couldn’t receive visitors; her hours were erratic; she was working night shifts. Still, her letters arrived like clockwork. Ai-ming didn’t write about the present anymore, but about things she remembered from Beijing or from her childhood.

In 1995, when Congress passed Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, we thought she would gain legal status within the year.

On the phone now, I didn’t know what to say. There was static now, all of a sudden. “Ai-ming, how are things, really?”

“Marie, my English has improved so much. They won’t be able to turn me down.” Her laugh seemed to come from someone else. “As soon as I have my papers, I’m going home. My mother…It’s nothing, only…” Behind her I heard a machine rattling. “You’ll come to New York soon, won’t you?”

“Of course!” But even as I said the words, I had no idea how such a trip would be possible. Ma and I were as broke as we had ever been.

“You’re seventeen already. If we crossed on the street, maybe I wouldn’t recognize you.”

“I’m just the same, only taller….Ai-ming, I have a new joke: What did the Buddhist birthday card say?” She was already giggling. “It said, ‘Not thinking of you.’ ”

“Ma-li, how many Buddhists does it take to screw in the light bulb?”

“Zero! They are the light bulb.”

The machinery behind her seemed to laugh in counterpoint. “Could you…” She coughed and took a breath. She said, “Do you still have that handwritten copy of Chapter 17? It was your father’s copy…”

I should have persisted, I should have asked her what she wanted to tell me, but Ai-ming seemed so fragile. It was as if I had become the older sister, and she the younger. I told her, “Of course, it’s right here on the bookshelf, beside the set we photocopied in San Francisco. Remember? I can see it from where I’m standing…This summer we’ll come to New York, I promise.”

“I miss your voices. Sometimes I’m on the subway for hours each day, I feel like a child in the underworld, and I imagine all kinds of things…The netherworld is a kingdom of its own, with its own prefectures, magistrates and government, it’s supposed to be another city entirely… I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away . Do you know this poem?”

Her words frightened me. “Ai-ming, don’t lose hope now, not when you’ve worked so hard.”

“Oh, Ma-li, it’s not that I’m unhappy. Far from it. I just want to take another step. I want to live.”

—

Before saying goodbye, I had written down her new telephone number on the same page as my solution for the continued fraction of √D. But when Ma tried to reach Ai-ming that night, the line was disconnected. I feared that I had misheard or made an error transcribing it, yet her voice had been so precisely, perfectly clear. When Ma tried to reach Ai-ming’s mother, the line rang, but no one answered.

Two weeks later, a letter arrived. Ai-ming said that her mother’s health had suddenly deteriorated and she was going home. She told us not to worry about her, that very soon she would be able to visit us in Canada. I had wanted to give Ai-ming my e-mail address — marie.jiang1979@pegasusmail.com. We had just set up the internet at home and this was the first address I’d ever had; I knew it meant we would never lose touch, we would be able to communicate almost instantaneously. Each afternoon, when I arrived home from school, I was convinced there would be a letter or a voice mail, but there was only quiet, a qù that became a friction in the air.