Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Red Guards came to the house. She heard them coming nearer and nearer, they came in and things fell down, more shouting, they saw her and said they would come back. Someone was crying. It was the neighbour, Mrs. Ma, she cried, “Shame, shame!” but at whom? Zhuli didn’t know, she was afraid to guess. Shame was a corkscrew inside her, winding together the selfishness, the frivolity, the hollowness of what she was, until there was no more possibility of change.

In the next existence, Zhuli decided, there would be more colours than in the human world, there would be more textures and varieties of time. This would be the world of Beethoven as he sat with his back to the audience, when he understood that sound was immaterial, it was nothing but an echo, the true music had always been inside. But take away music, take away words, and what would persist? One of her ears had been damaged. She longed for her mother and father. How brightly the core of herself flickered before her, just out of reach. What are you, she asked. Where are you?

She sat up and realized it was night. She sat up again and again, imagining herself pushing aside the sheet, walking to the doorway, to the outer room, to the fresh air outside.

—

Sparrow heard his cousin waking. He had fallen asleep in a chair beside her bed. She had already left the room and turned down the hallway before he fully opened his eyes. He could not move. She would see the posters that were drying on the kitchen table. Da Shan and Flying Bear had been forced to criticize Zhuli, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, and these denunciations would be pasted up in the morning. “Call her the daughter of rightist filth,” Ba Lute had instructed. “You have to. Just write it down. Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing, only words.”

Da Shan smudged the ink, and his father threw out the poster and made him do it again.

“Da Shan,” he said, “if you don’t denounce Zhuli, they’ll only make it worse for her. They’ll turn around and says she’s a demon, that she infiltrated our lives. Let them humble us, if that’s what they want. Isn’t it better to be humbled? Do you want your poor father, your brothers, to lose their lives?”

Trembling, the teenager dipped his brush. Carefully, he wrote Zhuli’s name.

Ba Lute had now been summoned to the Conservatory twice, where the struggle sessions had lasted a full twelve hours. Their neighbour, Mr. Ma, had disappeared, and so had Zhuli’s teacher, Tan Hong. “The criticism I receive is very light, compared to the others,” Ba Lute said, when he returned. He had bruises all over his body. One eye was swollen shut and his face was bloodied and lopsided, but his accusers, his own pupils at the Conservatory, had left his hands alone. People who had been labelled rightists in earlier campaigns, even those who, like Swirl, had been rehabilitated, were far less fortunate.

Twice, Sparrow had been taken away by a group of Red Guards. They had locked him in a storeroom at the Conservatory but nobody had come to criticize him or denounce him. Eventually the door was opened and he was sent away. It was as if he floated underwater, inside a bubble of air. On the streets, the students sang and wept and shouted their love. The targets who had been humiliated once were humiliated again and again, as if a familiar face elicited the most hatred, they were the ones to blame for the receding promise of modernity, the violent sacrifices of revolution, this malevolence that seemed to infect the very young. Only it was not malevolence, it was courage and they were loyal soldiers defending the Chairman. Sparrow had to protect Zhuli, he had to finding a hiding place, but where? His father had said the violence was most extreme at the universities. The radio proclaimed that, in Beijing, the writer Fou Lei, once celebrated for his translations of Balzac and Voltaire, was being subjected to daily struggle sessions alongside his wife. The family’s books had all been burned and the piano destroyed. Their son, the pianist Fou Ts’ong, had applied for and received political asylum in the West. The father, Fou Lei, the quiet traitor, the poisonous needle wrapped in a silk cover, was finally being called to account.

The morning grew hotter. When Sparrow woke again, Zhuli was sitting in bed, under the window. She had left a space for her mother, as if Swirl might arrive home at any moment. With her hair cut off, she looked even younger than she was.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can go back to sleep.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” He sat up in his chair, rubbed his face, pushing his uneasy dreams away. “No, I was only thinking.”

“I’m fine now, and I know when you’re telling fibs.”

He smiled. One hand drifted up to the opposite arm, rising to her shoulder, finding the ends of her hair.

“Six months,” Zhuli said in a low voice, “and everything will grow back.” She gazed at him, and the dark smudges on her face, the bruising which had turned a sickly yellow, made her appear shadowed despite the sunlight in the room. “Sparrow, have you seen my violin?”

“Your violin,” he said stupidly.

She waited, watching him.

“Zhuli,” he said. He despised the quaver in his voice and pushed it down. “It was destroyed.” She nodded, as if waiting for the second half of the sentence. He looked at her helplessly. “It was destroyed.”

“It was,” she said. “But then…”

“Red Guards came yesterday, no, it was two days ago. They came and smashed all the instruments. They even came in here but Ba…we asked them to leave. Ba Lute was denounced, he had to go to a meeting but it’s finished now. He’s home. The Conservatory is closed. Maybe for good.”

Zhuli nodded. She seemed, to Sparrow, almost unbearably lucid.

“Where are Da Shan and Flying Bear?” she asked.

“In Zhejiang with Ba’s cousin. Mrs. Ma took them by train. You need to go as well—”

“Yes,” she said, and then so flippantly he didn’t quite believe she had spoken. “I should have studied agriculture after all. Cousin, haven’t you been listening to the radio? The campaign is everywhere. Zhejiang will be no different from here.”

He did not tell her that four professors at the Conservatory had killed themselves in the last week and that Professor Tan had been locked in a room without adequate food or light. Zhuli did not mention the denunciations Da Shan had written. A wave of chanting overran the streets but they acted as if they did not hear it. It moved along Beijing Road, circling them. Zhuli asked if he had seen Kai.

“I saw him two days ago. I couldn’t tell how he was.”

“But he’ll be protected, won’t he? Nobody will harm him. They won’t harm you.”

The feeling in her voice came from another time, an old longing that did not know how to fade. He didn’t know what to do but nod.

She closed her eyes. “I’m glad, cousin.”

When she spoke again, her voice was very calm. “I’m glad,” she said. She touched her hair again and then let it go. “It’s like morning when the stars are painted over by daylight, Sparrow. You think it’s very far away, all this light, and anyway there’s a great universe of stars and other things and so you never believe they’ll disappear…Sparrow, of all the things they say I am, they are right that I am proud. I was proud to be myself. I really did believe that one day I would play before the Chairman himself, that I would go to London and Moscow and Berlin!” She laughed, like a child at the antics of a little pet. “I know now. Those places will only ever be words to me. My pride was so great I imagined that I would stand in the room where Bach lived, I would see his handwriting, his rooms and his little bed, and I would show people what it meant to me. They would hear it. They would hear Bach in me, they would know that he was mine, too. I don’t know how, I don’t know why…”