Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

There was no intermission. As the piano was being wheeled out for Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, Li Delun came to the microphone again. “We dedicate this Concerto No. 5 to our resurrected comrade, He Luting, President of the Shanghai Conservatory,” he said. “Long live Chairman Deng! Long live the Communist Party of China! Long live our country!” In the hall, surprise and consternation but also sustained applause and even, Sparrow thought, cautious jubilation. Amidst the noise Kai came forward and took his seat at the piano. It was small, the kind a well-to-do family might have kept in their home before the Cultural Revolution. It was the first piano Sparrow had seen since 1966.

Kai sat with his back rigidly straight. He had no score in front of him. Sparrow could see where his trousers, cuffed unevenly, lifted to expose his ankles. The pianist waited, both hands on his thighs, as the concerto opened in controlled exclamations, vibrating across the auditorium. Kai began, traversing the scales with a familiar clarity, only the tips of his body — head, fingers and feet — moving. Inside Sparrow’s head, multiple versions played; he simultaneously saw the performance and heard a memory, a recording. He listened to the immense space between then and now. When the allegro began, Sparrow closed his eyes. Up and down the scales again, as if Kai were telling him there is no way out, there is only the path back again, and even when we think we’re free, we only endlessly return. The concerto’s beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body. He remembered, long ago, playing Flying Bear’s violin for Zhuli. Beside him, the young woman’s eyes were glassy with tears that did not fall. Sparrow could not imagine weeping openly. He inhaled and found himself, against his will, listening. Near the end of the movement, the first, jubilant chords repeated, but the notes no longer conveyed the original feeling. Underneath was an ending, a buried movement, the sound of one life held captive by another. The concerto swept on, never pausing to dwell on its own astonishing constructions.

On stage, the first violinist played with his whole body and then, suddenly, as if remembering the audience, he closed up again. Sparrow tried to place Zhuli before him. Beneath the violin, her supporting arm had always appeared so pale. He remembered her humility before the music, even as a child she had felt accountable to it. The notes went on, as if living another life. He could have followed Kai to Beijing. But he had never known how to write music, to perform music, and yet be silent.

Tumultuous applause swept over him. Kai stood, all the musicians stood, their white shirts, damp with sweat, feathery against their bodies. The encores came.

Sparrow saw the young woman staring straight ahead and he recognized in her an ambition, a desire, that he was certain he no longer possessed. Would he ever contain that hunger, that wholeness, again?

—

Late that night, he played a series of nothings on an erhu that Kai gave him. Songs broke off and became other songs, Shajiabang sliding into “Night Bell from the Old Temple,” breaking into a fragment of Bach’s Partita No. 6 as if music blew through his mind like scattered pages. He kept on this way, playing the beginning of one piece and the end of another, and Kai lay back and gazed at the nearness of the ceiling. Kai had the key to this room where the Philharmonic’s instruments and record players were stored, but they could have been in Room 103, in Shanghai, in the remote Northwest or the far South, anywhere with four walls and only the two of them. Sparrow let himself believe they had found their way back to an earlier time. Kai asked him to play “Moon Reflected on Second Spring,” and Sparrow played it once, and once again, realizing that he could not recall the last time he had heard it. Perhaps on the radio in 1964. After that, it had simply disappeared. He felt a humming in his hands and a renewed, almost unbearable, pleasure. By the time professors from the Central Conservatory had discovered the composer of “Moon Reflected,” the blind erhu player, Ah Bing, was in his seventies. “If only you had come ten years earlier,” Ah Bing had famously said, “I could have played better.” The professors captured six songs on a recorder before they ran out of wire. When the songs reached the capital, Ah Bing was acclaimed as one of the nation’s master composers. He died only a few months later, and those six recorded songs became all that survived of his work. “Moon Reflected on Second Spring” was an elegy, a spiral of both radiance and sorrow.

Kai had other records. Overcome with curiosity, Sparrow set the erhu aside. Going through the collection, he felt like a child standing before a wall of colours. He chose Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Kai pushed blankets under the door to dampen the sound and opened another bottle of baijiu. They lay side by side on the thin mat, the tops of their heads grazing the record player.

“Shostakovich was criticized for the fourth movement,” Kai said. “Do you remember? The Union of Composers said it was inauthentic joy.”

“But inauthentic joy is also an emotion, experienced by us all.”

“The censors are always the first to recognize it, aren’t they?” Kai smiled and time ran backwards. Biscuit . The name came unexpectedly to Sparrow. He had known the young woman in the pale green skirt and flowered blouse. She had been a violinist. She had been the same age as Zhuli.

Kai was still speaking. “Later on, Shostakovich reused pieces of the fourth movement in his patriotic work, cantatas to Stalin and so on. Did you know? All those fragments of inauthentic joy. In 1948, when his music was banned, he publicly accepted the wisdom of the Party. But, each night, after the long meetings, he went home and composed. He was working on his Violin Concerto No. 1 and, for the first time, he hid his name inside the work.”

Sparrow knew but had not thought of it in years. The signature, D, E-flat, C and B, which in German notation read D, Es, C, H, curled like a dissonance, or a question, in Shostakovich’s music.

The Fifth was everything Sparrow remembered, tortured, contradictory, lurid, gleeful. The room ceased to exist, the record itself became superfluous, the symphony came from his own thoughts, as if it had always been there, circling endlessly.

Sip by sip, the wine loosened their reserve. Kai said that in Beijing, in 1968, the struggle sessions had started up all over again. Mass denunciations were moved into stadiums. He saw a student humiliated and tortured in front of thousands of Red Guards.

“For what crime?”

“He said the children of political criminals shouldn’t be persecuted. That class status shouldn’t pass down across generations.”

The children of class enemies. Like Zhuli. Like Ai-ming. “What was his punishment?”

Kai turned, surprised by the question. “He died.”

When Sparrow asked how, he said, simply, “They shot him.”

Kai wiped his hand over his mouth. “Ozawa has promised to bring a few of us to America. I have this hope…”

The last time they had been alone, Shanghai was on the verge of change. This small room seemed to Sparrow like a hidden space inside the Conservatory. When he left this room, perhaps the door would lead him back to the hallway of the fourth floor, where the walls were covered with posters. He would arrive in his office before it was too late, he would tell his cousin that all things, even courage, pass from this world. Everything passes. But he could not get there in time. When he entered the room, he saw her again, just as she was. Each year, as he grew older, as the Zhuli in his memory grew younger, as Da Shan and Flying Bear drifted further away, he knew he should let them go. But how could he explain it? The person inside him, the composer who once existed, would not allow it. And Sparrow, himself, could not erase the composer. The composer wanted to tell Kai that no one, not even Deng Xiaoping, and nothing, no reform or change or disavowal, could return those years to them.