Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

He smiled at her, in the way that Ba Lute sometimes smiled thinly at Flying Bear. Kai reached into his satchel and withdrew a sheaf of music. “Don’t be stubborn,” he said. “Take these.” She stared down. He had placed in her hands familiar pieces by the deceased composer Xian Xinghai, a hero of the Revolution.

In her bewilderment, she felt entirely alone. The concrete buildings, crowded roads and all the passersby seemed to move inside a light that didn’t reach her. “Jiang Kai,” she said spitefully, “now I understand. I’ll forget Prokofiev. I’ll play the ‘March of the Volunteers’ and ‘The Internationale’ for all eternity. The old world shall be destroyed. Arise, slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing . That should win me the Tchaikovsky Competition and please everyone, you most of all.”

There was his patronizing half-smile again. “Comrade Zhuli, don’t make the silly mistake of thinking your talent is enough.”

“My talent doesn’t concern me,” she said. “What I need to know is, will Sparrow’s talent protect him? That’s what you and I care the most about, isn’t it?”

Instead of speaking, he painstakingly tied up his bag, which was patched in both corners and on the strap. He should conduct, Zhuli thought, all his movements have the illusion of expressing so much.

She wanted to ask him how he could acquiesce on the surface and not be compromised inside. You could not play revolutionary music, truly revolutionary music, if you were a coward in your heart. You could not play if your hands, your wrists, your arms were not free. Every note would be abject, weak, a lie. Every note would reveal you. Or perhaps she was wrong and Kai was right. Maybe, no matter his or her convictions, a great musician, a true genius, could play any piece and be believed.

She wanted to put all these thoughts into questions but by the time she had recovered herself, Kai had turned and walked away.

The movement in the street rustled and shamed her; no one else had a moment to rest, to think, to be afraid. Yet here she was, with time on her hands. She looked down at the music he had given her, which she saw now had been transcribed for violin and copied out by hand. Midway through, the notes wobbled and tilted, as if running into the wind. It must have taken him hours. But why would Jiang Kai do such a thing for her? When did he have time?

She began walking, directionless, fearful that the posters trailed behind her like mud stuck to her shoes. The words: counter-revolutionary, monsters, blind feeling, false love, witch. Inside her head, Ravel’s Tzigane refused to be quiet. It billowed on and revealed itself as the composition of a madman. To escape, she rushed between the bicycles to Xiangyang Park. The grain and oil lineups snaked past her, and a line of grandmothers stood in studied silence, clutching their ration coupons. The sun was high now and the heat intolerable, but everyone seemed blank and unsweating. Of course, I will go back and find Kai and apologize, Zhuli thought, even though she kept walking. How many self-criticisms had she written? A thousand pages, two thousand? Yes, she was selfish and plagued by immoderate desires and yes, her love for music was a weakness. She had confessed these faults since she was eight years old, but she had stubbornly refused to purify her heart. Chairman Mao said, “To be aware of one’s own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them means taking a liberal attitude to oneself. These people talk Marxism but practise liberalism. Yes, this is how the minds of certain people work and they are extremely harmful to the revolutionary collective.” The park came like a sip of water. There was a shaded bamboo bench and she sat down, her violin case on her lap.

In the grass, a boy, no more than five or six years old, was curled up on the ground while his mother stood a few feet away. She wore a grey suit and a grey cap made of wool, a furnace in this humidity. The mother had a ball which she nudged towards her son, but the boy ignored her. Even the ball was grey. She retrieved it, turned and kicked it back to him. Still her son did not move. He lay motionless in the grass like an injured animal. Minutes passed. The boy leaped up as if suddenly awakened.

The boy went to the ball and faced his mother. But, unexpectedly, he turned and kicked the ball in the opposite direction. A thump echoed in the grove.

The boy waited.

The mother ran gracefully past her son and caught up with the ball. Undeterred, she returned it to him. Once again, he made as if to return it, but then, at the last moment, gave it a hard kick in the opposite direction. Once more, the mother chased it down. Again and again this scene repeated itself, the boy nastily kicking the ball away, the mother patiently retrieving it, the boy standing idly.

Zhuli closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, she saw that the torment had ended and that the boy and his mother were playing. They dodged one another, feinted, floated the ball towards an imagined net.

Zhuli slid sideways on the bench, opened her violin case and stared at the instrument. She had a lunatic desire to smash it on the ground. Beyond the park, she heard what sounded like an encroaching sea but was only Red Guards. “Down with Wu Bei!” the students shouted. “Kill the traitor, destroy the criminal gang, down with Wu Bei, down with Wu Bei!”

The boy, who moments ago had been laughing in delight, inexplicably grew weary. His mother passed the ball to him and he abruptly turned and walked away. The ball rolled past him, into the trees. He sat down. His mother ran after the ball, tapped it back to her son and waited. When nothing happened, she pecked it forward again but the boy was now prone in the grass. Still his mother circled him, the ball creeping ahead of her. They seemed oblivious to the shouting of the Red Guards at the outskirts of the park. She had never seen a child and a mother act in this manner; it was as if the world had fallen on its side and the child had been shaken into irritable old age. The mother hovered in her shapeless grey suit. What was love to this child? It could be rescinded as easily as a command.

“The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the People!” “What will you sacrifice, what will you sacrifice?” “Stand up and serve the Revolution!”

Something is coming for me, Zhuli thought. “The more ruthless we are…” But an ocean, she thought, overcome suddenly by inappropriate laughter, only an ocean would destroy her. She closed the violin case and set it in carefully in the grass. Ravel’s Tzigane slid over the shouting and covered her thoughts. Note by note, the music began again, it sounded so fiercely that her arms strained from hallucinatory exertion, her shoulders ached, and yet the music in her thoughts played on lavishly. Music was pouring into the ground. Far away, the voices of the students sounded like weeping, “We must remake ourselves and change the world! We must serve the People with our hearts and minds! From the Red East there rises a sun, in China there appears a Mao Zedong!”

Time, the park, the slogans, the mother and child: she pushed them all away.

Time, the pressure of the strings against her fingers, the weightlessness of the bow, would not leave.

When the last note ended, she awoke into the quiet. The demonstration had moved on. The grove was empty and the mother and the boy had vanished as if they had never been. Even the patch of shadow in which they had stood was gone.

There was someone watching her. The haze in the air and her own distraction had made her careless, and she had not noticed this other person. He stood up now and came towards her. Zhuli finally recognized him. Tofu Liu, her classmates called him mockingly. He was a soft-hearted, soft-spoken violinist. He was almost camouflaged; both his trousers and shirt were the same shade of army green.