Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Even now, I send letters to all the last known addresses.

When I walk through our old neighbourhood, Ai-ming’s voice comes back, as does my mother’s. I wish to describe lives that no longer have a physical counterpart in this world; or perhaps, more accurately, lives that might continue if only I had the eyes to see them. Even now, certain memories are only growing clearer. “Once more, Sparrow recited the letter he had received from Wen the Dreamer. It had its own cadence now, the pulse of a libretto: My dear friend / I trust this letter finds you well! / And that you remember me / your dreaming friend….”

THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, Sparrow had told Swirl and Big Mother about the letter, reciting it by heart. Big Mother had punched her knee joyfully, and then punched the other one. “The puny bird picks up all the news!”

“So it’s true,” Swirl said. “I knew it was true.” For a moment she appeared as Sparrow remembered her, long before the camps, a teenaged girl outrunning the war. “If he contacts you again, tell him to go to the plant and flower clinic of the Lady Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground. Lanzhou City, Gansu Province.”

“Notes from the Underground,” Sparrow repeated. “Lanzhou City.”

“You’ll take care of Zhuli, won’t you?”

“Between Ba Lute and me, Zhuli will want for nothing. I promise.”

“Be vigilant and keep your wits about you,” Big Mother said. “Shanghai is full of walking sticks.” She meant informers and spies. Beside her, the rucksacks, packed and waiting, hunched together like conspirators.

“I will.”

Light from the moon slid through the window, gathering in Big Mother’s water basin. Slapping her belly like a drum, she recited,

“Moonlight in front of my bed

I took it for frost on the ground

I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon

Lower it, and think of home.”

To Sparrow, she said roughly: “Watch over your father. He has no clue how to live without me.” Her eyes reddened.

“Be careful, Ma.”

Big Mother laughed, a cackling that sliced across moon and water.

Perhaps one day in the future, Sparrow thought now, as he lay in bed, he would write an opera about the life of Wen the Dreamer. And now the messenger sets out to Hubei Province to find the mysterious Comrade Glass Eye, bringing a copy of a copy of a copy of the Book of Records. The opera would open with a flourish, with the bravado of Shostakovich, before modulating towards the aligned, careful beauty of Kurt Weill, a libretto from Mayakovsky:

The streets our brushes

the squares our palettes

The thousand-paged book of time

says nothing about the days of revolution.

Futurists, dreamers, poets

come out into the street

and Li He:

Yellow dust, clear water under three mountains

the change of a thousand years is rapid as a galloping horse.

In the distance China is nine wisps of smoke

and in a single cup of water the ocean churns.

Could such an opera be more than an idea, a counterfeit, an imitation? Could he sit down and write an original work, a story about the possible future rather than the disputed past?

How difficult would it be to track down Comrade Glass Eye? Surely in the Village of Cats, outside of Wuhan, he would be easy to find.

Two days later, he told Ba Lute that he had accepted the Conservatory’s commission to collect folk songs in Hebei Province. His composition student, Jiang Kai, would accompany him during the six-day trip, and serve as research assistant. Sparrow even showed his father the steel wire recorder and wire reels he had borrowed from the Conservatory. Ba Lute nearly levitated with pride. He unpacked crumbling maps and expired train schedules; he weighed Sparrow down with letters for long-lost comrades from Headquarters until Flying Bear giggled and said, “He doesn’t work for China Post, Ba!”

Da Shan said morosely, “Who knows if your friends are still alive?”

Ba Lute gaped at him. Sparrow gathered up the letters and said, “Don’t worry, Ba, I’ll deliver them all.”

Zhuli tapped her fingers on the cracker in her hand, swept her long hair over her shoulders and said, “Careful with the ruffian.”

He smiled and resumed packing and she slowly ate her cracker. She whispered to him, “I’m not going anywhere until my mother gets back. She and Big Mother must be halfway to the desert by now. You’d like me to go with you and Jiang Kai…wouldn’t you?”

He kept packing.

Zhuli continued. “I would love to but…what if there’s a visitor or a message from my father?” And she stared at him with her searching eyes.

“Yes,” Sparrow said. “Good idea.”

Then he told her: “Think only of your concert, Zhuli. Practise every moment, don’t let this opportunity slip away. Think what it will mean to your parents if the Party allows you to study overseas.”

She blinked away sudden tears. “I won’t let them down, cousin.”

—

He met Kai at the bus station early the next morning. Beside the squat buildings, the ration lineups shifted in blurred congestion, winding around corners and disappearing into the horizon. The streets felt tense and watchful. When their bus flapped open its doors, they managed to find two seats near the back, over the tire. Kai insisted on carrying the wire recorder. Meanwhile Sparrow held his erhu against his chest and tried not to be crushed. More and more people shouldered on and the bus seemed to expand and contract like a lung, and then only contract. A supremely old lady folded herself onto Sparrow’s seat, and he found himself squeezed against Kai’s shoulder. As the bus bounced onto Jintang Road, Sparrow saw the city change, the concrete blocks giving way to open spaces, patches of light gliding into the flatlands of the outskirts. Kai’s unruly hair shuddered in the breeze. Sparrow began to sweat. The bus laboured on.

At some point, he must have fallen asleep. He woke up to find Kai’s arm around him, protecting him and the erhu from the old lady who had the concentrated heft of a bowling ball. Inch by inch, she was appropriating the seat, and at the same time cracking sunflower seeds in her teeth. Sparrow tried to return to the dream he’d just awoken from, which involved Herr Bach seated before a comically small pianoforte, playing No. 13 of the Goldberg Variations in order to demonstrate a particular subtlety of strict counterpoint. The composer’s name brought together the words bā (longing) and hè (awe). Bach’s face was as solemn as the moon. In the sticky, sweaty rocking of the bus, music rippled in his memory as he walked on stepping stones marked bā, hè, bā, hè, Sparrow fell asleep again.

Kai woke him in Suzhou. They alighted, as if drunk, from the bus. Inside Sparrow’s rucksack, the thirty-one notebooks of the Book of Records (all mimeographed except for the hand-copied Chapter 17) elbowed against his back, as if he were carrying Da-wei and May Fourth on his shoulders. They sprinted to catch the bus to Nanjing, which had just begun to pull away. The bus groaned forward and the ticket taker waved them up to the roof to find a space among the chickens, the students and the baggage.

Kai climbed up first, then turned, reached down and grabbed Sparrow’s arm just as the bus was picking up speed. When Sparrow looked dizzily up, all he saw was the pianist’s earnest face against the white sky, and then, panicking and holding on for dear life, he was hoisted up beside Kai. The students on the roof made space for the bewitching Kai, who naturally took centre stage. The pianist could speak with both the quickstep of the city and the balladry of the countryside, he was a one-man Book of Songs and Book of History . Kai told a sly joke that made the boys howl and the girls smile knowingly. The grip of Kai’s hand on his had left a bruise on Sparrow’s skin and it ached to the teetering of the bus. “Teacher,” the pianist said, touching his arm briefly, “won’t you play a song to light our way?” A teasing affection gleamed in Kai’s eyes and made the girls draw closer. “This comrade,” he told them, “is our nation’s most celebrated young composer! Believe me, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your lives.”