Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

He turned and began walking quickly towards the door beneath the second gable, the gifts rustling against his oversized shirt. Sparrow had to jog to keep up. Quietly, Comrade Glass Eye said to him, “Who instructed you to search for me by that name?”

“My uncle, known as Wen the Dreamer.”

The man showed no expression but kept on walking, balancing his gifts.

A wooden door opened without a creak or complaint and then a lamp hissed on although the man had touched nothing. Sparrow, Kai and Jian followed him inside. They dodged an enormous glass fishing buoy, climbed three steps, and entered a room with a single long table and a wall of shelves. Wires of light began to gleam, as if awoken by their movements. Comrade Glass Eye put his gifts down. He gestured towards the full yet uncluttered room and said, “You are welcome to look around.”

“Teacher,” Kai said, “is your main interest light?”

“It was,” the man said. “But when I returned from re-education, I discovered that my supply of copper wires was gone. During the Great Leap Forward, people broke down my door and carried away all the metal. You remember the slogan, ‘Struggle to produce 10.7 million tonnes of steel.’ When Chairman Mao instructed the villages to industrialize, my neighbours discovered all my bits and pieces, even my voltage meter, my collection of batteries, pinhole cameras and metal coils, not to mention my cooking pots and metal spoons, and fed them to the smelter that you’ll see if you walk fifty paces to the east of here. They managed to produce a surprising quantity of steel but, sadly, none of it was useable.” He shrugged and one of the electric lights fizzled, dimmed and then gleamed brightly again. “Upon my release, my neighbours all came and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame, Teacher Edison, you weren’t here to help us fulfill our steel quota?’ And then I was glad that I hadn’t been present to hand over all my spatulas and wires, as well as my mother’s wedding ring and the German stein my father brought from Düsseldorf many years ago, as well as my bicycle. Sometimes it is better not to say goodbye.”

The man paused for breath and to consider the long table, which held only a few items. “Come and look at my eyes,” he said.

He lifted out a cabinet, set it before them, and slid open a drawer that curved to the side like a hidden wing. Laid out on a notched paper surface, in even rows of eight, were eyes. Another light crackled on automatically. The eyes were ordered in a spectrum from black to chestnut irises, each with a subtle interweaving of lines, fissures and depths. They were hollow half-spheres made to fit, the man said, over the non-working eye, or over a sphere which had been implanted in the socket.

“These are for the right side,” he said. He slid open the second drawer which extended in the opposite direction. Forty further glass eyes appeared. “And these are for the left. Each one is paired to another, but I prefer to store them separately.”

Sparrow inched closer, hypnotized by the play of colours and the unreal, discomfitting feeling of the eyes moving over him.

“It seems like yesterday,” said Jian, who had been silent until now, “that I first met Teacher Ai Di Sheng, in this very room. I had lost my eye when my best friend, in a regrettable moment, punched me in the face. How could I lose my eye over something so inconsequential? Afterward, I couldn’t eat or sleep properly, and when I looked at my reflection all I saw was the empty socket, as if my entire self was being funnelled into that small, ugly opening. All night I would sit in my dark room and play my violin and its voice was the only thing that comforted me. Only music could express my pure feeling. I was broken by the loss of that eye.

“My best friend, who had hit me unintentionally and who also felt shame when he looked at my face, discovered Teacher Edison. So, one day, I found my way here. We sat at this table, face to face, and we spoke about vision, one-sidedness and the double nature of life. He asked me whether a glass eye would be for myself or for my best friend; in other words, did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me? Well, I was very depressed and both perspectives struck me as equally valid. After all, when I remember my past, I see myself as if from the outside, I perceive myself as another person might. So we came to the conclusion that eyes are not one-sided. Teacher Edison lectured me for a long time. He said that a glass eye could not be a replacement for the lost one, but rather a new addition, neither a blindfold nor a seeing eye, but a painted mirror…‘Please!’ I said, ‘I don’t care what it is…if you can help me you must! I feel as if I’ve been cut in two.’ And so, over many days, he painted my first prosthetic. It was chestnut brown with flecks of orange and a hint of gold, which he said was the nature of my seeing eye. One day, on a sunny morning just like today, we put it in for the first time. After the long wait and my impatience, I refused to look in the mirror. I was afraid of the devil I might see! What if my reflection turned out to be a monster, a new self even more hideous than before? But he ignored my tears and fixed the eye in place.”

Jian closed both eyes and seemed to hold his breath, then he opened them, looking directly at Sparrow. “When I finally looked into the mirror, I saw myself, as if for the first time, as a human being like any other. It is just an eye, such a small thing, but…” He turned towards the very thin man. “I think it’s almost time for a new eye, Comrade.”

Comrade Glass Eye assessed the violinist’s face. “As we get older,” he said, “the colour of the iris fades. So perhaps you are right, and the colour could come down a degree.”

“So you see,” said Jian, “we two are like brothers.”

On the long table, Sparrow took in a delicate set of glass tubes, a Bunsen burner, miniature jars of paint and slender paintbrushes that seemed to have only a single hair.

“I have a spare room,” Comrade Glass Eye said, “just through here, if you, my friends, wish to stay a few nights with me. It is a simple but welcoming place.” Under the electric lamps, both of the man’s eyes seemed like painted objects, peculiar, shining with a mystery of their own. Before Sparrow could answer, Kai said, “We would be glad to, Teacher.” The thin man clapped his hands, making them all jump. “And you, Old Jian? Come and keep an old fool company.”

“I brought my violin,” Jian said. “And young Sparrow plays the erhu.”

“Then you must come and see my musical instruments. If you follow me this way…”

—

That night, it stormed. As Sparrow played for them, the tap-tap of rain needles percolated into the music, interfering with the notes, muffling some and enlarging others, as if the downpour had a mind of its own and conducted the entire field of sound within and without the two-gabled house. Comrade Glass Eye served a muddy, sweetened coffee that he said came from the Buddhist lands of the southern seas, followed by a rice wine Jian said came from the western borders of Turkmenistan. In the corner of the room was a small harpsichord, so thin and earth-toned that Sparrow had not even realized it was there. He lifted the cover, revealing a Latin inscription.

“Music,” Comrade Glass Eye translated, “is a solace of great labours. So, young man,” he said, turning to Kai, “won’t you play for us? Teacher Sparrow has told us that you are a divine pianist.”

Kai tried to say he was merely ordinary but they would not hear of it. Finally, he sat down on the rickety wooden bench. He began to play a Bach cantata transcribed for keyboard, the “Actus Tragicus.” Sparrow had the feeling of descending a sunlit staircase. The libretto rose up to meet him: “Ah, Lord! Teach us to think that we might die so that we might become wise. Put your house in order, my child, for you will die and no longer remain among the living .”