Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

In the kitchen, Ba Lute was rereading Big Mother Knife’s most recent letter. Do you take me for a fool? Tell me what has happened .

The envelope contained two further letters, addressed to Zhuli from her parents. So they had found Wen, Ba Lute thought. But was a miracle still a miracle if it came too late? He took out his lighter, lit the pages and dropped them into the brazier. “Nine lives, one death,” he said, reciting an old saying, watching the paper curl simultaneously away from and into the flames. “Nine lives, one death.”

Da Shan set his brush down. The poster was already four feet long. Looking up the staircase, his eyes met Sparrow’s, and the boy’s face flickered with emotion. Sparrow recognized grief, fear, remorse. The boy was a teenager and aspired to be an architect, but the red scarf of the Young Pioneers was knotted firmly around his neck and ink had roughened his hands. If you want to be an architect, you should go to Tiananmen Square , Sparrow thought. You should see the head, the hands, the feet, the heart, the lungs. You should stand in the middle of the Square and listen . Zhuli’s shadow seemed to twist in the stairwell as if her spirit was tied to his thoughts, and unable to be free.

Da Shan waited for Sparrow to say something. Coming home, he had hoped only that his older brother would help him, that Sparrow would not allow him be sent back to Zhejiang where, to make up for the impure elements within their family, Da Shan had to take the lead in attacking teachers and other classmates. He had to break them down. Flying Bear had said that Zhuli must be guilty because only a criminal would kill herself. Flying Bear had vowed never to go home again.

“Only traitors commit suicide,” Da Shan said now, staring up at his brother.

Smoke lifted away from Sparrow’s fingers.

“Only the guilty kill themselves. Is that true?”

Silence.

“Is it true?” Da Shan said again. He was infuriated by the softness and the weeping in his voice. “Is it right that she killed herself? If Zhuli was really a traitor, she deserved everything that happened.”

Sparrow came down the steps and Da Shan waited for him to act, to strike him down at last. It was this terrible quiet, Da Shan thought, that had come between them and which he had no idea how to undo.

When they were face to face, Sparrow touched his shoulder. There was no weight to his brother’s hand. “In Zhejiang, make sure you’re worthy of the Red Guards. That’s your only family now, isn’t it?”

Da Shan burst into tears. Infuriated, his words came out as blows. “You’re worse than a traitor. Who’s protecting you? You did nothing to save Zhuli, all you cared about was your own career!”

Sparrow dropped his hand. He looked at Da Shan and thought, You used to be so small that I could throw you over my shoulder as if you were a sack of beans.

Their father came out of the kitchen. “Enough,” Ba Lute whispered. He was flicking his lighter on and off. “I don’t want to hear your cousin’s name. Are you listening to me? It’s finished now. Finished.”

Da Shan ignored his father. “You’re a true coward, Sparrow. Maybe Zhuli was a traitor but at least she knew who she was. Do you really think you’re invisible? Do you think no one can see what you are?” The louder he shouted the angrier he became. “You were always the most talented one, everyone said so, but what good is talent if you have nothing inside? They’ll come for you next, I promise. No one can save you. I’ll make sure of it.”

In a daze, Sparrow turned towards the poster Da Shan had written. He himself had taught his brother to write his first words and now he took comfort in the fact that the characters were flimsy, crooked and nearly unreadable. He turned and walked out of the room, through the front gate and into the laneway.

“My brother, the degenerate!” Da Shan had followed him to the laneway and was shouting after him. Watchful faces floated in the windows above, assessing, judging. “Have you no shame?” Sparrow went in the direction of Beijing Road. He had neglected to take his coat and the wind cut through him. It was a chill wind, out of keeping with the season. Loudspeakers blared, speaking faster and faster. Terrified, his thoughts took on a dreamlike quality so that every face that he passed looked familiar: a friend, a student he had taught, a child he had known. The loudspeaker repeated its slogans, Long live Chairman Mao!

“Ten thousand years,” Sparrow said. In truth, he wanted to believe. He would not feel so utterly alone if only he could give in and place his trust in a person or just an idea.

Long live our glorious Revolution! Long live the People!

Ten thousand years.

Our generation will achieve immortality!

At the Shaanxi Road intersection, children were throwing bricks at a store that sold women’s clothing. Sparrow leaned down and impulsively took up a brick. In his hand, it seemed entirely pure, the weight of a newborn infant. The children were singing a familiar nursery rhyme. “The grass in the meadow looks fresh and green! But wait ten days, not a blade will be seen!”

The loudspeakers rattled on, “There is no middle road.”

Paint on the walls denounced the occupant as a dissolute and immoral young woman. Lust and desire, which placed private interest over the public good, was a bourgeois luxury and a political crime. A boy swung his arm back. The brick shattered a window on the second floor. Inside the building, a girl was crying. He did not know what room the weeping was coming from. The degeneracy of your head, your heart, your hands, feet, lungs . Everything was finished. He thought the voice cried out, “I would have loved you for ten thousand years.”

He stood with the brick in his hands until the boy took it from him. Forcefully, the boy launched it into the air, he sent it crashing through the target’s door.

—

Shanghai Wooden Products Factory No. 1 smelled of the earth. Each morning on waking, Sparrow shook wood dust from his pillow and his hair. In the public bath house, dust from his body turned the water orange. He hardly recognized himself, his arms and chest had thickened, reshaped by hours of stacking, lifting and hammering. Yet for the first time Sparrow could remember, his hands were immune to pain; callused, they had grown a thickened coat, a brand new shell. After his shifts, the factory fell away like an extended dream, but when he slept he still heard the factory’s disjointed percussion — thumping, crashing and syncopated drumming, dotted with sirens, buzzers and bells — not so different from the musique concrète of Varèse’s Amériques . He couldn’t stop hearing this music of the everyday, and its continuity threaded together his former life and his present.

One morning, when he had been at the factory for more than a year, Sparrow’s work unit was summoned to the meeting hall. Attendance was mandatory and so, long after the room was full, workers continued to squeeze themselves in.

Six televisions had been set up. Abruptly, a live broadcast began, the first televised struggle session of the Cultural Revolution. An elderly man was dragged onto centre stage by a phalanx of Red Guards. To his shock, the Red Guards were known to him; they were former Conservatory musicians who had risen to leadership positions. The stage, white with klieg lights, seemed to shear the television screen in half. Sparrow watched, frozen. Kai stood among a group at the front. He looked sturdier, more self-possessed. At first, Sparrow did not recognize the elderly man, whose head the Red Guards were forcing down so brutally his face could not be seen. A slow pandemonium unfolded. When the elderly man looked up, Sparrow saw that it was He Luting, former President of the Shanghai Conservatory.