Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The lucidity in Zhuli’s eyes frightened him.

“There’s a joke inside of it,” Zhuli said, “that’s why everyone laughs at me. Do you understand? All these things that we don’t have are nothing compared to the things we did have . A life can be long or short but inside it, if we’re lucky, is this one opening…I looked through this window and made my own idea of the universe and maybe it was wrong, I don’t know anymore, I never stopped loving my country but I wanted to be loyal to something else, too. I saw things…I don’t want the other kind of life.”

Sparrow stood and went to close the door that was already closed. He went to the window, which was latched tight, he drew the curtains and tried to think of what to do. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to Zhejiang. You won’t be alone. Flying Bear and Da Shan—”

“No,” she said. “It would only cause trouble for them.”

But what option was there? It was unbearable that there should be no escape. Think, he told himself, you must think clearly. The notebook, pen and cup beside the bed drew his attention, and he slid the pen aside and picked up the notebook. He was shaking. The sight of Wen the Dreamer’s handwriting disturbed him. Where was Big Mother, where was Swirl? They alone, not he or his father, knew how to protect her. He despised his own weakness. “Zhuli,” he said. “This disturbance will end. It must end.”

“My poor father. What will he feel when he comes home and sees what has happened to us all?”

He didn’t answer and Zhuli reached her hand to him, to the notebook. “I finished this one. Let’s continue. Chapter 17, it’s your favourite chapter, isn’t it? Here’s the box, under the bed. I had to hide it from Ba Lute.”

He lifted the box out. Zhuli combed her hands through her hair, as if preparing to receive a visitor. She said, “I have this idea that…maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived. That’s why it seems so familiar to us now. The future is arriving. We’ve come all this way to meet it.”

“Or maybe,” he said, “it’s we who keep returning to the same moment.”

“Next time, we’ll meet in another place, won’t we, Sparrow?”

“Yes, Zhuli.”

Sparrow read the chapter aloud as afternoon became evening, as if reading from the Book of Records was the same as shutting and bolting the outside door. Inside the room, Da-wei would soon leave America and return home, but before his departure, a composer named Chou brings him to a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. A hundred musicians radiate from the central figure of the conductor, Edgard Varèse, and, meanwhile, a second, smaller orchestra plays from an adjoining room. Alternating and colliding, audible but invisible to one another, they perform a single symphony using drums, alarms, scraps of song, sirens, a shouting flute, the bang and clank of metropolitan horns. The pandemonium of the symphony is the most beautiful thing Da-wei has ever heard. It seems simultaneously to include him and usher him on his way.

“Da-wei, you mustn’t go back,” Chou tells him afterwards. “It’s too late to return.”

Da-wei does not know how to answer. Before him, the orchestra has vacated the stage but their music stands wait like a flock of cranes.

“Myself,” Chou says, “I left Shanghai during the worst of the fighting. The Japanese pursued us, but we managed to disappear into a crowd…” His face, so alive in its story, turned grey. “The army apprehended another group, mistaking them for us. They rounded them up and shot them all. They were massacred…You see how it is. A life for a life. I can never go back.”

In the chamber, it feels as if all the hundreds of chairs are inclined towards them, listening.

“I tell you: our country has no need for us. You and I, we’re all yí mín, altered people, which is to say, we will soon be the most common people in existence.”

When the chapter ended, Zhuli took the notebook in her hands. She said, “I have never heard Varèse. I have heard so little modern music from the twentieth century. I wish, one day, I could go abroad and listen to what they’re hearing.” She said, as she if hadn’t realized until this moment, “Da-wei is the shadow of my father. All these years, because of the handwriting, I imagined he was writing to us directly. To me. It was never just a book, was it?…Sparrow, promise me. Don’t let Ba Lute burn the notebooks.”

“Yes, Zhuli. I promise.”

—

Nearly three thousand kilometres away, Wen the Dreamer arrived in Yumen City, Gansu Province. Since his escape from Jiabangou, he had crossed and recrossed the Northwest for nearly two years, no longer the same bookish young man with poems folded into his pocket. In his mid-forties, darkened by the sun and burned by the wind, old before his time, he was lithe, alert and physically toughened. He stole the identity cards of passing strangers, thereby changing his name on a monthly basis; he stopped, when necessary, to earn money or ration coupons by working in a wheat or millet field, or a cement factory. With his battered suitcase, he crossed and recrossed the desert, learning how to live in the dry moonscape of Gansu Province, how to evade capture and how to exist on air alone. One day, he found, in a book barrow in Xinjiang, a copy of Chapter 6 of the Book of Records. He stared at the pages, fearing that he was lost. Hallucinating that Da-wei, May Fourth and the Book of Records was a myth, an allegory or a system around which all their lives were knotted. Seeing his distress, the child tending the book barrow said, “My father read that book, he got it from our cousin. He doesn’t have the whole book though, just a few chapters. This one’s extra. He won’t sell the rest.”

“Where does your cousin live?”

The child raised her faint eyebrows. “Jinchang. He works in the nickel mine.”

That night, Wen read the notebook without a pause, devouring it as if it were a plate of food, convinced with each turning of the page that he knew the handwriting and would always know it. In this copy, a secondary character’s name had been altered: the copyist had used the character 谓 which was the wei of Wei River, whose source was in Gansu Province.

He travelled to Jinchang, a town made curious by its scattered buildings of foreign design, said to be the ruins of Roman-style houses left by a thousand exiled soldiers who settled there two thousand years ago. Their descendants were occasionally born with green eyes and startling red hair. These days, the town was more famous for its nickel and precious metals. In Jinchang, he found another chapter, also mimeographed, dated only six weeks previous, and using the same code. The owner of the book barrow was reticent, but finally he confided that he received the chapter from a honeydew farmer in Lanzhou. Wen the Dreamer followed the trail, down half a dozen roads and chapters until, one day, he knocked at the door of Notes from the Underground, the plant and flower clinic of the Lady Dostoevsky.

“My dear man,” the Lady said. “It’s about time. I was sure I would be dead by the time you finally got here.”

She told him that Swirl was in Yumen City with her sister, where the two women worked in the local song and dance troupe. As he left, she pressed into his hand the copy of The Rain on Mount Ba, which had once belonged to his daughter and still had Zhuli’s handwriting in the margins.

A week later, Wen the Dreamer appeared in Yumen, thin as a spear of grass. He came to the simple dwelling Lady Dostoevsky had described, where Swirl lived with Big Mother Knife. Lamplight flickered behind the curtain. He stood outside with his suitcase for a long time, afraid to let her see him, afraid to imagine the cessation of his loneliness, afraid of the future and also the past. He remembered how he used to watch Swirl’s window in Shanghai, waiting for the lamp to be extinguished so that he could deliver a new chapter of the Book of Records. A lifetime ago. Two lifetimes. Now all the copies held a record of the places they’d been, the places they’d been forced to leave. He had tried to clip his hair, to clean himself and mend his clothes, but still he felt the uncrossable sea between who he was and who he might have been.