Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Later on, he rarely spoke his wife’s name. Instead, he occupied himself by telling a story that had no beginning and no end, and that was born of the Revolution. One of the characters, May Fourth, reminded me very much of my own mother. May Fourth leaves her life and disappears into the wilderness; meanwhile, Da-wei searches for his family across the ocean and the desert. Wen could divide their lives into pieces and distribute them over a hundred days or over a thousand.

“One day, I recognized myself in the story: there was suddenly a young man who made glass eyes for a living and felt most at ease, most himself, among the partially sighted and the blind. I also began to recognize the lives of our fellow inmates in Jiabangou. I heard the echo of their star-crossed loves and youthful dreams. In the end, I never knew how much Wen the Dreamer made up, or how much was part of the original book he had memorized. Perhaps no one knows but the author himself; even Wen has lost track of where he begins and where the story joins him. He has become far more than a skilled calligrapher.

“The Year of the Rat arrived. It was 1960. Strings were pulled by a childhood friend of my mother who had heard of my case and worked discreetly to have me freed. I was unexpectedly resurrected. I was literally brought back to life because, in a few months’ time, there would be almost no ‘rightists’ left. Professors, thinkers and scientists, leaders who had taken part in the Long March, grandfathers who had spilled blood for the Party, good men, weak men, honest and conniving men, bachelor men and men with a dozen desperate children: they were no more. Our great Communist community turned away as these human beings were ground to dust.

“I had to leave, even if it meant breaking my promise and abandoning Wen. The last time I saw him, your uncle told me that he had made a plan of escape. I actually laughed. Getting out was impossible. He might as well have made a plan to turn Mao Zedong into Charlie Chaplin. I told him his ragged clothes weighed more than he did. Worse, there was nowhere to go. The Party guarded the train station as if it were a storehouse of gold.

“ ‘But I am not gold,’ he said.

“ ‘Then what are you, my friend?’

“ ‘Just a copy of a copy. A migrating soul.’

“He was mad, I thought, and soon would leave this world. This was the only escape open to him. I hid my grief and I said to him, ‘One day the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Jiabangou will be common knowledge, the way the Boxer Rebellion and the Long March are written into our books and our memories. My brother, we will not be abandoned by history.’

“Wen said to me, ‘That will not happen in our lifetimes, nor the lifetime of this stone beneath my foot.’ Then he looked down at the ground on which there were no visible stones, only dry grass and splintered branches. Who was right? It’s too soon to say.

“There was no one around us, there was not even a breeze. There was no one to overhear me but I had gotten into the habit of whispering. But what could I say that was honest and true? What had I learned in these three terrible years? Did I know more about living or dying? ‘Wen,’ I said, ‘this country exists in fear. I am a rationalist and a scientific man. I believe the rules of life become ever more intricate, there are unseen wires from each to each that we cannot see, not yet. We are here to learn and not to forget, here to question and not to answer. You are a man of questions. Of all the destinies of the world, this is a heroic one, and yet it carries suffering for it is hard to live with so little certainty. Why were we sent here to Jiabangou? Whose purpose did it serve? For I believe it must serve some purpose: we are the builders of the Revolution and also its scapegoats.’

“ ‘Escape is the only answer,’ Wen said.

“ ‘Escape is death.’

“Wen smiled. He had wasted away. If he lay down to rest his head, I feared he might never rise again. He said, ‘I would never walk knowingly to my death.’

“He showed me his suitcase. Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts. What new movement could the Party proclaim that would bring these dead souls into line? What crackdown could erase something that was hidden in plain sight?

“ ‘This is my fate,’ Wen the Dreamer told me. ‘To escape and continue this story, to make infinite copies, to let these stories permeate the soil, invisible and undeniable.’

“And so he escaped,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “With the suitcase, I am sure, and convinced of his destiny.” He wiped his eyes. “I am glad Wen the Dreamer sent you to me, but I wonder which story he wanted you to hear. You know how it is: pull one thread, and the whole curtain unravels.”

“He wanted me to hear just the story you told,” Sparrow said. “I am sure of it.”

“There is the engineer we called Geiger, and also the former soldier, Paper Gun.” He waved at the air as if the two men were standing beside him. “I was given the name Comrade Glass Eye. Perhaps that is the lesson the Party wanted us to learn: in our basic needs — air, water, food, and shelter — nothing separates the doctor from the flea, the educated from the ignorant. So, in fact, I was re-educated after all. I learned this lesson all too well.”

Across the clear morning, Sparrow could see Kai bringing water to the garden, ladling it out with a small container.

“If you had to guess, where do you think my uncle might have gone?”

“Wen the Dreamer has no identity papers and he has, therefore, little room to manoeuvre.” The old man shook his head. “He is a refugee in his own country. There are two routes that I can see: either the northern journey of May Fourth into the desert, or across the ocean like Da-wei. Which would your uncle choose?”

“Neither. He will not leave my Aunt Swirl or Zhuli.”

“Agreed. Regardless of his trajectory, you will hear from him.”

“Yes,” Sparrow said. “He can’t prevent himself from putting pen to paper.”

The old man laughed. He seemed to emit light for a moment and then the light wavered and dimmed.

“Come,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “I think your friend has recovered from last night’s festivities. He is ready to continue playing music for us and I’m ready to rest my feet and close my eyes, bend my head, and listen attentively. I remember now that Wen the Dreamer always began his stories with the greeting, ‘Kàn guān. Dear listener.’ ”

—

That same day, while practising Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Zhuli could not stop thinking about her parents. Had Swirl and Big Mother Knife reached Gansu Province? What was the probability that her father would come across an altered copy of the Book of Records? It was as likely, Zhuli thought, as her being invited to play Prokofiev before Chairman Mao and the villagers of Bingpai.

She had been just a child then, only six years old, when she discovered the underground library. Sitting alone, frozen by the winter sun, she had seen a stranger emerging from the soil. His head had seemed to lift from the ground as if he were crawling out of his own grave. The stranger turned north, his long, baggy body melting into the trees. Zhuli had stood, peering after him. Was he an escaped convict or just a stranger passing through? Maybe it was the ghost of her great-grandfather, Old West.