Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

—

Later on, Sparrow came to know that he had taken the rope from around his cousin’s neck. He had somehow managed to gather Zhuli in his arms, climb down and leave the room. Outside the Conservatory, it had still been early. He took side streets and if people came up to him or spoke to him, he did not register their presence. After walking several blocks, it dawned on Sparrow that the sound of the city was dulled. Six trucks bearing water drums navigated the narrow lane, but he only became aware of their presence when he caught sight of them. There was a vibration in the pavement, and there were women at a water spigot, and there was a queue for flour, but he moved through them as if through images or projections. He kept walking and became aware of Ling running towards him, and of Zhuli in his arms as if she were sleeping. He had to focus all his mind, all his energy, on keeping her from falling. Her head against his shoulder dug into him. Red Guards came and pushed their faces against his face, but he could not hear them. There was a crowd of them. And then, he did not know how or why, he no longer saw them. He came to Beijing Road, to the gate, the narrow laneway and the maze of alleyways he had known nearly all his life. Ling was still beside him, but why had she come? Ba Lute was there. He had seen them somehow or he had been alerted. It happened so quickly, Ba Lute’s approach, Zhuli taken into Ba Lute’s arms, and Sparrow standing by himself in his own home. He knew his father was calling Zhuli’s name, he knew because now he could hear. The room suddenly became very loud. Ling was sobbing. People had gathered in the alleyway, but nobody dared cross into the inner courtyard, it had been so polluted by crimes and spirits. Ba Lute, whose great bulk had turned so thin and old, was crying out, as if he could wake her, “What mistakes did we make? We’re old, we’re old now. If I sat down and wrote down all our mistakes, would that be enough? Answer me! What everlasting sins did we commit? Didn’t we win this country? Didn’t we sacrifice ourselves for the Revolution?” He kept shaking Zhuli as if he could drag her back to this place. Sparrow sat down on a chair. He remembered now how the tears on his cousin’s face had still been wet. How long did it take for tears to dry? How close had he come to arriving in time? He thought of Wen the Dreamer and his Aunt Swirl and his mother. He closed his eyes and tried to drown out Ba Lute’s voice. Ling reappered. She put a blanket around him and blocked out the world. He remembered the blanket that had covered him on the bus with Kai, the music that rang out, the constellations above them. He laughed and disregarded his weeping, which sounded as if came from another person. He laughed and wept until midday came, and with it the true August heat.

LONG AGO, AI-MING LAY beside me on my bed, holding Chapter 17 from the Book of Records in her hands. The story continued even though she had long stopped reading from its pages. In the quiet, Zhuli existed between us, older than me, younger than Ai-ming, as real as we were ourselves. Each time we set the notebook down, I had the sensation that she remained. It was we, Ai-ming and I, listening, who vanished.

LONG AGO, WHEN they lived in Beijing, Big Mother Knife had taken Sparrow to Tiananmen Square. Sparrow had only been a child but he remembered, still, how the concrete felt inextricable from the grey sky, how he himself was impossibly small, like a seed in a bowl. The Forbidden Palace and Tiananmen, Big Mother told him, were built on a north-south axis that mirrored the human body. “Head!” she shouted, pointing to something he couldn’t see. “Lungs! Feet!” Tiananmen Gate, festooned with imaginary animals, was the protective tissue around the heart. North-gazing animals monitored the behaviour of citizens, while south-gazing animals judged how power treated the powerless. Sparrow had imagined himself as a stone creature on the gate, wings outstretched, beak glistening in the rain.

Day after day, Sparrow read the public newspapers pinned up at the post office. Photos in the People’s Daily captured the exhilaration inside Tiananmen Square, as hundreds of thousands of Red Guards lifted their Little Red Books to Chairman Mao, whose tiny figure waved back from atop the gate. The students arrived by trains for which they no longer needed tickets. They rushed into the Square like water pouring into a single container. “Ten thousand years, ten thousand years!” they shouted under the gaze of those imaginary animals. “A hundred million years to Chairman Mao!”

September blared on, wet and sticky. There was a smell in the air, a nauseatingly sweet smell of bodies left to rot in cellars or on the street. When the Shanghai students returned from Beijing, they were even more single-minded than before.

For a week, Ba Lute had been locked up in a shed with six other faculty from the traditional music department. After his release, he was barely able to stand. A letter from Swirl, sent via Big Mother Knife, arrived: Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, referred to as two bags of ribbon, had been safely received in Mongolia. They begged for news. Ba Lute’s reply was only three sentences: Everyone is fine. No need to hurry back. Long live Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!

Every moment, Sparrow expected to be summoned but the Red Guards never came for him; everyone seemed to have forgotten he existed. He kept seeing the Conservatory, the record, the rope. During the day he tried to sleep and at night he kept watch over the bed in which Big Mother, Swirl, Zhuli, and his brothers had, at different times, slept. In the gloom, he searched for the outlines of his own hands and feet but they were camouflaged by the darkness. Night after night, he felt as if he was slowly approaching Zhuli but when morning came he saw that he had only slipped further away, and the distance between them was growing. His unfinished symphony played on in his head, unstoppable. All it lacked was the fourth and final movement, but what if the fourth movement was silence itself? Perhaps the symphony was complete after all. Too numb to weep, unable to put words to what he most feared, he bundled the pages up, intending to burn them, but in the end he hid them under the trusses of the roof.

—

Two months after Zhuli’s death, Sparrow accompanied Kai to the house of a high-ranking official who lived on Changle Road. On the streets, there was turmoil, warfare between gangs of Red Guards over territory and influence. The official’s home, however, seemed a separate country, hushed by walls of scrolls and paintings. The light that fell through the stained-glass windows was the impossible blue of sapphires.

“We recently recovered this piano,” the official said, as he ushered them into a high-ceilinged room. Recovered from where, or from whom, he did not say. “As the instrument is far too valuable to remain here, the Party is shipping it to Beijing.”

A young girl in a flowered dress brought out an overabundance of food and drink. Sparrow gazed at the clean edges of his dinner plate while the official spoke at length about Madame Mao, the new model orchestras and a reconstructed Central Philharmonic in Beijing. “Comrade Sparrow,” the official said, dabbing his lips with a pure white napkin. “Your compositions found favour with the President of the Conservatory, didn’t they? The former President, that is.” He smiled in a friendly way. “He Luting was a bit stuck in his ways, don’t you think? Fortunately things have changed. Now is the time for new music, a revolutionary realism befitting our Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”