Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Well, well,” Ling said. “A bookish spy! Kai was right to be intrigued.”

“Have it ready by next week,” the Old Cat told him over the scattered giggling. “And don’t eat with it.”

“Take this one, too,” San Li said. “Dmitri Shostakovich. Translated from Russian. It’s too technical for us.”

Sparrow accepted.

In the darkness, the radio announcer was repeating familiar words, Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a group of counter-revolutionary revisionists …

—

Bowls of peanuts and a jug of rice wine were passed from hand to hand. The older gentleman proposed a toast to “Lakes of wine and forests of meat!” and when everyone raised their cups, the lone candle went out. Ling started humming a song he couldn’t place.

“My boy,” the older man said, turning to Kai, “it’s been weeks since I saw you. The piano in my house grows dusty, and Ling says you never visit anymore.”

“Why, I saw her yesterday,” Kai said laughing, “but I’ll come tomorrow, Professor.”

The wine had permeated all of Sparrow’s limbs, and the Professor appeared round as a floating balloon as he scooted over. Some of them we have already seen through , the radio shouted, others we have not! Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors…

Tipsily, the Professor turned to Sparrow. “I’ve heard so much about you, Comrade. If I may say so, your String Octet is one of my favourite pieces of music. Such an honour to finally make your acquaintance.” Around them, conversation was breaking into smaller pieces. The Professor hummed a song, “Jasmine,” that took Sparrow back to the teahouses of his youth. Sparrow confided that he had travelled the length of the country singing that very song.

“In my youth,” the Professor said, “I, too, travelled. I was conscripted by the Kuomintang. Fortunately, I managed to slip away and cross over to the Communist army. It was horror. The fighting, I mean. But we made this country.” He paused, thumped his knee twice softly and said, “Afterwards, I arrived at the victory celebration in my hometown, only to be told…when the Japanese entered the town, my wife disappeared. I said to myself, many people were displaced during the aggression. If the gods are watching, I’ll surely find her again.” The Professor had gone to Shanghai to teach history and Western philosophy at Jiaotong University. “Our books are full of stories of mistaken identity, star-crossed love, years of separation. Do you know the classic song, ‘The Faraway Place,’ well, you must, of course. I can’t hear it without thinking that my beloved has finally returned. It’s been twenty years since I last saw her, but in my mind she’s the same.”

“Tell him how I came to live with you,” Kai said. His voice was soft. In the darkness, it was unexpectedly near.

“Ah,” the Professor said. “Well, in 1960, I learned that my wife’s nephew had a gift for music. I arranged admission for him to the preparatory school of the Shanghai Conservatory—”

“You moved heaven and earth,” Kai said.

“Well. I had fought bravely in the war. As I said, people bent their ears to me back then. In any case, that is how Jiang Kai arrived in Shanghai. He was eleven years old, it was just after the Three Years of Catastrophe…I tell you, this was my first indication of the disaster that was happening there. We had shortages in Shanghai, of course, but nothing like the countryside…” The Professor motioned towards the window. “Kai came to live with me and, in my home, there was suddenly music. I was tutoring Ling at the time, and he used to follow her everywhere she went. They were inseparable.”

He took the erhu and held it as if the instrument could answer a confusion in his mind. The old Professor played the opening notes of “The Faraway Place,” then smiled regretfully at Sparrow. He set the bow down.

In the room, conversation had turned inward. Ling was saying, “But who loves the Revolution more than we do? Who would die for it? I would. So why can’t I criticize policies and still be considered a reformer within the Party? Why does the Party persist in believing that criticism only comes from class enemies?”

“But the cultural revolution, the new campaign, is about questioning the old ways of doing things,” Kai said. “Renewing ourselves—”

San Li was peremptory. “Don’t be naive. It’s criticism along acceptable and correct lines—”

Ling intervened. “Every work unit has to turn over a set percentage of rightists, but that’s crazy, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s genius. Either way, it’s entirely systematic.”

The talk murmured on, never finding a way through or an idea they could all agree on.

Loosened by the wine, Sparrow’s thoughts drifted. Underneath the radio and the voices, he felt concealed, as if he really were a spy. Tomorrow he would arrive at his office at the Conservatory and continue his symphony. The four white walls, the plain desk and open space in his mind, could so spare a life be called freedom? He had been listening to Bach again. How had this composer from the West turned away from the linear and found his voice in the cyclical, in canons and fugues, in what Bach referred to as God’s time and in what the ancient Song and Tang scholars saw as the continual reiterations of the past, the turning of the wheel of history? Campaigns, revolutions themselves, arrived in waves, ending only to start again. Could Bach’s limitations create another kind of freedom? Could an absence of freedom reveal the borders of their lives, their mortality, their fate? What if life and fate turned out to be the same thing? He shook the thought away. The wine was making him soft. He would have to stand up soon, find his bicycle and pedal home, and it would be up to his feet and legs to turn in circles. This room, he told himself, was an anomaly, perhaps one of many: corners of the city that had not yet been polished smooth. Zhuli would have understood, instinctively, what troubled him, she would have seen how the Professor and his friends were willing to leave their allotted space and march to the centre of the stage. But all Sparrow wanted was time to sit in his room and write, he wanted to set down this music that came, unstoppable, unending, from his thoughts.

The Old Cat picked up the remaining book, opened it almost halfway and began to read grumpily. Her voice reminded him, with a pang, of his mother. The story was familiar to Sparrow even though he had never encountered this book before.

She read, “Grandfather smiled sympathetically, but did not tell Cuicui what had gone on the night before. He thought to himself: ‘If only you could dream on forever. Some people become the prime minister in their dreams.’ ”

—

The glasses were emptied and the books packed away. So as not to attract attention, they left at intervals: the Old Cat and Ling, followed by San Li, Sparrow and finally the Professor. Kai, who was leaning against the wall by the door, touched Sparrow’s arm lightly as he passed through. In the hallway, Sparrow stood listening, but instead of the Professor or Kai, all he heard was the belligerent clamouring of the radio, of all the radios in the building. The entire city, he realized, would soon be deaf, and that would be the end of his musical career.

He wished that a week had already passed, and that he was, at this very moment, returning up the concrete stairs to Kai’s room. If only he were just now lifting his hand to knock, waiting to be allowed inside. Instead of leaving he might, at this moment, be arriving.

—

Early the next morning, when Zhuli entered Room 103, Tzigane became the only Shanghai. Hours later, she emerged humbled and electrified. The sky was blue-grey as if it had swallowed all the Mao coats in the city. She heard Ravel ( Tzigane ), Prokofiev (Sonata for Solo Violin No. 4) and Bach (Partita for Solo Violin No. 2), each on a separate channel as if she were standing between three concert halls. On Julu Road, cyclists seemed to branch out from the music itself; they disappeared in the fog of July sunshine. She walked east on Changde Road and west again. A line of tricycle carts, weighed down by oil drums, creaked north and commuters parted around them like shoals of fish, their trousers fluttering. Time slowed.