Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered. “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”

Was it the little girl with no shoes? But when she turned, she saw only a press of bodies and no sympathetic face. The queue no longer existed and had been reshaped by the crowd. Where were her ration coupons? Had somebody pulled them from her hand? No, they were still here, tucked in the pocket of her shirt. She felt nauseated and knew she would vomit. Where was the woman? What hideous flaw had they seen inside her? The crowd seemed to swell and hide her, separating her from the hysterical Red Guards, the mob was both a terror and safety. In its frenzy it was evolving from hundreds of bystanders into a single entity, a snake with a thousand eyes twisting this way and that, searching with ever greater intensity, magnifying every speck of dirt within it. The snake wound its long neck around and around. When it found her, it lifted her right up and forced her through the crowd. “Don’t be afraid,” she thought, “this is not real.” She found herself standing in another line. Was that her voice crying out? There were a dozen people with her, old women, mothers and even girls, staring in shock. Red Guards swaggered around them, pushing them to their knees. Zhuli felt a shock of pain as she hit the concrete. Momentarily she became dissociated, she was watching from a few steps away, she was a part of the crowd and could see the targets and also herself. A girl, a different girl, was coming with scissors. She was yanking the heads back one by one and cutting off great clumps of hair. “Disgusting bitches,” the girl repeated. Zhuli re-entered herself and felt the blinding snap of the scissors and then an alien lightness as a swath of hair fell. “It’s nothing,” she thought, “only I must not lose the ration coupons. Ba Lute will be very angry if I let them fall from my pocket.” Other things began to happen. Someone said, “Oh, this is the violinist. The stuck-up bitch whose father is a counter-revolutionary.” They pulled her bag from her, turned it upside down and the Beethoven score slid out in a wild flutter of pages. She heard crying and begging, the rough splitting of clothing, but Zhuli focused on the papers. “I know this filth. Her mother is a rightist dog!” They were laughing at it, stomping on it, pretending to sing from it. People had arrived with dripping buckets and she saw streaks of black cutting through the air. They threw ink, or was it paint, on all the kneeling bodies. Zhuli bowed her head and it was as if the jeering and the spitting had broken the surface, everything was coming inside. The first three, five, seven slaps made her cry out in pain and anger but after that, there was a numbness as she began to lose feeling. Time expanded, just as it had in Bingpai when she was a child, and her father was kneeling in the centre of the room. She had wondered, then, why her father had not stood up. Why would they not let him rise? She thought of Ma and what passed from mother to daughter, from husband to wife, from one beloved to another, a bloodline, a touch, a virus. “I was the one who opened Old West’s library,” Zhuli thought, beginning to lose consciousness. “It was my mistake and it is destroying my parents’ lives. Every slap, kick and humiliation that I receive is one less for my mother. What am I inside? What is it they finally see?”

“I’m talking to you, you little slut!” They kept shouting. Her head was pulled back again. “How did this dirty whore slip through?” “Confess who you are!” They were screaming through their loudspeakers right into her ears as if they wanted to deafen her. They slapped the side of her head over and over. Is it a crime to be myself? Is it a crime to disbelieve? She wanted to weep at her own slowness, her own naïveté. The ink drying on her face made the skin tight and painful. All the other women were confessing to something. Zhuli seemed to be the only one still kneeling. She knew she was guilty but she could not confess. Around her, the crowd gave the impression of expanding and rising in exultation. “Open your mouth, you demon!” More slaps, and now they kicked her, pulled her upright again, and now they tied her arms behind her so that her wrists were high up, above her shoulders, and her head was nearly on the ground. “Hours of practice,” Zhuli thought deliriously. “I have practised and practised. I have memorized thousands of hours of music, and what will this be? A tiny pearl of time soon to be dissolved.” Zhuli could not hear. She saw faces all around her, she was aware of movement without noise. They seemed to think she was useless, an imbecile, and they turned their attention to the woman beside her who was crying so hard she could no longer hold herself up. Pity overwhelmed Zhuli and she saw darkness behind the woman. That is the place I must get to, she thought. But paint, or was it ink, and sweat had gotten into her eyes and she could not wipe them clean. It was unbearably hot. They would be back for her but she could hear only murmuring, a quiet, and it protected her. “I am ready now,” she thought, “to bring all these flowers for…I will find all the flowers, even if I must steal them from the hands of our Great Leader, I will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She had given every bit of her soul to music. The words of Goethe’s Faust returned to her: How great a spectacle! How great…But that, I fear / Is all it is . The quiet would show her the way out. Silence would expand into a desert, a freedom, a new beginning.

—

She became aware of movement and felt there was a great deal of space around her, a darkness that she took for asphalt, the road, or nighttime. Where were her arms? They seemed to have detached from her body and fallen away. “My fingers have gone to gather my hair,” she thought, wanting to smile, “they have gone to pick up my beautiful hair.” It was useless to try to open her eyes. They were crusted shut and she had nothing to hold on to but a stabbing pain that seemed to come from deep in her lungs. Piano music came, unidentifiable. How near it was but no, the music was a prank. Who played the piano in times like these? “Oh,” she thought as a trickle of water touched her eyes and then her lips, “my good hands have brought me water.” She heard an echoing and then it was as if the air changed pitch, a fog gave way to rain, rain shaded into tone, tone into voices. And then one voice in particular, which she knew immediately and impossibly to be Kai. “No,” she thought, the pain in her lungs increasing, “it is not good to fall into his hands.” Again the sensation of movement. Then the road came away from her skin. Kai was with her. At the bottom of all these tangled impressions she glimpsed a changed idea, another way of loving someone that she had not experienced before, an attachment like that to a brother, to a friend, to a lover who could never be her lover, of a musical soulmate, a companion who might have been a lifelong collaborator. “It is a great pity,” she thought, “that we will never have the chance to play Tzigane together because we brought something to it that had never been heard before. David Oistrakh himself would have recognized us; it is the truthfulness and the shame, no, the solitude, that comes from being at odds with oneself. It is loneliness. Only that, Kai,” she thought. Yes, if only it were Kai.

“Yes, Zhuli,” he said. “The Red Guards have all gone now.”

There was no more time. She was moving and yet she was still on the road. She was kneeling and yet she was lying in a dark, humid room. She heard Ba Lute, she heard Flying Bear crying, and Kai saying that two of the women targeted in the struggle session were still on the road, they were dead. One, a professor of mathematics at Jiaotong, had been dragged along the pavement for a kilometre. Zhuli pushed the noise out, it was coming at her not through her ears, but through a breeze against her arms, her hands. Someone washed her, she knew it could only be Sparrow. She knew she was safe and could now open her eyes if she chose to, but she did not choose to. Silence had come to her. It did not try to connect all its pieces, to pretend they were part of the same thing. It didn’t need to pretend. Silence saw everything, owned everything, eventually took everything.