Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The priests in Kai’s village must have owned a harpsichord, for the pianist played it as if it were his own. He ingeniously folded the music in half and then half again, emerging at the third movement with a chorus unexpectedly rapt with joy: Today, today, you will be with me in Paradise . And from this height, a place best described as kǔ lè, a state containing both joy and sorrow, the music began to tumble down, suddenly blending into Sparrow’s own unfinished Symphony No. 3. Kai had only heard it the one time but now he played it from memory. The transition astonished Sparrow. The notes simultaneously faltered and climbed, faltered and lifted. The music seemed cast in an unknown and unimagined hue, so that Sparrow felt as if he were hearing his own composition for the first time.

When the movement ended, Comrade Glass Eye shook his head. “But what music is this, that reminds me of things I once knew?” He began, drunkenly, to remember the camps of the Northwest. “Was it so much to ask,” he said, “to be allowed to live one’s own life, honouring one’s parents and raising one’s children to the best of one’s ability? Why is so simple a life the most difficult to obtain?” The portraits of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao assessed them like busybody neighbours. “Poor Teacher Edison!” cried Jian, leaping to his feet. Sparrow feared the walls were listening and he wanted to say it was only music but could not bring himself to voice words so patently untrue. Kai paused to let the audience settle. The pianist gulped down a full glass of the Turkmenistan wine, and caught Sparrow’s eye with a sad, helpless smile. He began playing again as the rain fell harder, sweeping them all away from Wuhan, from the county, the province and even the earth itself until everything swayed including the tremor of Kai’s music. They focused exclusively on the sixth and seventh bottles, and Sparrow experienced a delirious freedom of thought and freedom of movement. The doors exhaled and covers of beds swept open to welcome them and Sparrow listened to the deluge while Kai held him clumsily in his arms. “How could you play my symphony so perfectly?” he asked. Kai answered, “How could you think I would forget it?” They fell asleep this way, touching without fully touching, near and far away, satiated and yet full of yearning.

—

Sparrow was the first to wake. He heard the rattle of a truck on the broken road outside and became aware of Kai slowly falling off the narrow bed. Gently, he pulled the unconscious pianist back onto the mat and covered him. The young man murmured in his sleep and said, “Dear Sparrow,” and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness. He lay quietly, the wine now aching in his head, and listened to a noise from outside, the sharp note of a spade tapping stone. He pulled on his clothes and went out. In the dusty garden patch, Comrade Glass Eye was on his knees, occupied by something just emerging from the ground.

“He arrives,” Comrade Glass Eye said, addressing the plants, “the nephew of Wen the Dreamer. A renowned composer as if from another time and age.” Aided by Sparrow, he slowly got to his feet. “Let me show you the furnace our village built during the Great Leap Forward. A model of ingenuity,” he said frowning.

They began to walk away from the house, sloping down a hill towards a line of softly whistling trees. Sparrow saw the smelter Comrade Glass Eye had spoken of, a misshapen black hat rising up from the dirt, abandoned.

“There it is! May it stand for eternity!” Comrade Glass Eye said, nearly shouting. Then his voice dropped low. “A rumour says that Wen the Dreamer is no longer at the camp.”

Sparrow nodded.

“If you’ve come all this way to inquire after him,” the older man said, “I know nothing of his whereabouts. I am very sorry.” They were not moving quickly. Comrade Glass Eye favoured the right side of his body, and his forehead shone with the effort of hiding his physical pain. It seemed clear to Sparrow that the inventor was gravely ill.

“Teacher, let’s stop here to rest.”

“No need, no need.” And then, even more softly: “I’ll feel better away from the house. There are spies everywhere. I’m afraid I was rather foolish with my words last night.”

Sparrow nodded. He turned to look back, half expecting the doors and windows to have tottered after them.

“Wen the Dreamer had a suitcase,” Comrade Glass Eye said, after they had been walking for some time. “A very important suitcase. It held a clean set of clothes, a picture of his wife and their little girl, what was her name…”

“Zhuli,” Sparrow said.

“Of course. Zhuli.”

“I received a letter from him.”

The old man seemed not to hear. His eyes were glassy in the sun, and then they were suddenly wet. Tears fell and mixed with the man’s sweat, and only then did Sparrow know that Comrade Glass Eye had understood. “Our friend is not only a fine calligrapher,” the man whispered, “but an escape artist of the highest rank. Where does a person hide in the desert? It’s like a fish trying to hide in a tree!” He stopped to turn away, lifting his hands to his face. He said, from behind this shelter, “I’ve seen men leave this world midway through a sentence. If I tell you what we lived through, would you believe me?” His hands descended. “If I told you that, all through the bitter winter, we lived inside caves, what would you say? That good men, educated and honest men, had to copy the ways of animals in order to survive the climate, but we were not animals! We were missing sharp teeth and pointed ears and thick fur coats! We and all our men starved…Comrade Sparrow, I’m going to tell you the truth about these camps. I’m a very old man and if it turns out you’re a spy, I’ve nothing to lose but myself. I can’t betray Wen because I’ve no idea where he’s gone. I only hope he took the suitcase with him.”

“I promise you,” Sparrow said. “I’ll keep all our secrets.”

The old man nodded. He was already half-submerged in his own memories.

“The year I met Wen the Dreamer,” Comrade Glass Eye said, “there was famine everywhere. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, the true face of our Revolution was revealed. Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steelmaker? How did they imagine that a boy who had studied the fields all his life could make iron ore out of nothing? I think it is much more serious than ideology, production and material needs. We had to become only what they proclaimed us to be, we existed to be forged and re-forged by the Party. Here in this village, the communal kitchen was shut down for lack of food. The ground and the trees were stripped bare. Nobody had a pot to cook their soup in, let alone soup itself. In six months, half the people starved, first the children and the old, and then the rest.

“It is a pitiful death, this useless wasting away, and it was a silent famine because few in the city knew what was happening in the countryside. All they knew was that food enough was coming in through the proper channels. All the grain had been requisitioned, you see, they took it away and left the countryside with nothing.” He nodded his head, and turned his face to the undulating line of land and air, to the grey mountains in the distance. “In the Northwest, our own famine was a catastrophe. We had no ceremonies. What can the Party say at the funeral of a convicted rightist? To them, he had already died long ago.

“But I was fortunate in my gifts. If I may say so, hunger inspired my most ingenious creations! Over time, your uncle became my tall and trusted assistant. Wen the Dreamer and I made pulleys and tools out of nothing more than the desert wind. Every storehouse can be broken into — every camp administrator’s private quarters, every cook’s kitchen — if you have the right hands and the right tools. Dreaming Wen could reach the highest windows, he could stretch like an expanding ladder. We had a motto, Brother Wen and I, not to waste anything in the wastelands. We ingested compost, animal feed, we welcomed any nutrient under the sun. From the Party to our stomachs! From the sun of Chairman Mao to our lips! We promised ourselves that we would seek out the last edible crumb on this empty plate and find a way to eat the plate itself, if necessary. There would be no slow death for us, only a slow regeneration. Every day we woke up and cursed our leaders, the Revolution and history, and we worshipped life, learning and the future.