Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (30 page)

San Li said, “Hurry up, the spy is dozing off!”

“
A birch tree, a spruce, a poplar is beautiful,” Ling began, “when it climbs slenderly aloft; an oak, when it grows crooked; the reason is, because the latter, left to itself, loves the crooked, the former, on the contrary, loves the direct course….Which tree will the painter like most to seek out, in order to use it in a landscape? Certainly that one, which makes use of the freedom, that even, with some boldness, ventures something, steps out of order, even if it must here cause a breach, and there disarrange something through its stormy interference.”

She read for thirty, forty minutes, and every word was distinct. When she closed the book, the grandmother asked if she would be willing to take it away and mimeograph a new copy.

“I’m already copying
My Education
and the department is suspicious. Give it to San Li.”

General merriment followed. “Last time, he stuck all the pages together with syrup–” “Ling found a fishbone, didn’t she?” “Chicken bone.” “I like to leave a little something for you lot.” “It’s the Permanent Revolution of San Li’s dinner.”

When the laughter faded and the Schiller remained unspoken for, Sparrow raised his voice. “I will do it.”

“Well, well,” Ling said. “A bookish spy! Kai was right to be intrigued.”

“Have it ready by next week,” the Old Cat told him over the scattered giggling. “And don’t eat with it.”

“Take this one, too,” San Li said. “Dmitri Shostakovich. Translated from Russian. It’s too technical for us.”

Sparrow accepted.

In the darkness, the radio announcer was repeating familiar words,
Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a group of counter-revolutionary revisionists
…

—

Bowls of peanuts and a jug of rice wine were passed from hand to hand. The older gentleman proposed a toast to “Lakes of wine and forests of meat!” and when everyone raised their cups, the lone candle went out. Ling started humming a song he couldn’t place.

“My boy,” the older man said, turning to Kai, “it’s been weeks since I saw you. The piano in my house grows dusty, and Ling says you never visit anymore.”

“Why, I saw her yesterday,” Kai said laughing, “but I’ll come tomorrow, Professor.”

The wine had permeated all of Sparrow’s limbs, and the Professor appeared round as a floating balloon as he scooted over.
Some of them we have already seen through
, the radio shouted,
others we have not! Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors…

Tipsily, the Professor turned to Sparrow. “I’ve heard so much about you, Comrade. If I may say so, your String Octet is one of my favourite pieces of music. Such an honour to finally make your acquaintance.” Around them, conversation was breaking into smaller pieces. The Professor hummed a song, “Jasmine,” that took Sparrow back to the teahouses of his youth. Sparrow confided that he had travelled the length of the country singing that very song.

“In my youth,” the Professor said, “I, too, travelled. I was conscripted by the Kuomintang. Fortunately, I managed to slip away and cross over to the Communist army. It was horror. The fighting, I mean. But we made this country.” He paused, thumped his knee twice softly and said, “Afterwards, I arrived at the victory celebration in my hometown, only to be told…when the Japanese entered the town, my wife disappeared. I said to myself, many people were displaced during the aggression. If the gods are watching, I’ll surely find her again.” The Professor had gone to Shanghai to teach history and Western philosophy at Jiaotong University. “Our books are full of stories of mistaken identity, star-crossed love, years of separation. Do you know the classic song, ‘The Faraway Place,’ well, you must, of course. I can’t hear it without thinking that my beloved has finally returned. It’s been twenty years since I last saw her, but in my mind she’s the same.”

“Tell him how I came to live with you,” Kai said. His voice was soft. In the darkness, it was unexpectedly near.

“Ah,” the Professor said. “Well, in 1960, I learned that my wife’s nephew had a gift for music. I arranged admission for him to the preparatory school of the Shanghai Conservatory–”

“You moved heaven and earth,” Kai said.

“Well. I had fought bravely in the war. As I said, people bent their ears to me back then. In any case, that is how Jiang Kai arrived in Shanghai. He was eleven years old, it was just after the Three Years of Catastrophe…I tell you, this was my first indication of the
disaster that was happening there. We had shortages in Shanghai, of course, but nothing like the countryside…” The Professor motioned towards the window. “Kai came to live with me and, in my home, there was suddenly music. I was tutoring Ling at the time, and he used to follow her everywhere she went. They were inseparable.”

He took the erhu and held it as if the instrument could answer a confusion in his mind. The old Professor played the opening notes of “The Faraway Place,” then smiled regretfully at Sparrow. He set the bow down.

In the room, conversation had turned inward. Ling was saying, “But who loves the Revolution more than we do? Who would die for it? I would. So why can’t I criticize policies and still be considered a reformer within the Party? Why does the Party persist in believing that criticism only comes from class enemies?”

“But the cultural revolution, the new campaign, is about questioning the old ways of doing things,” Kai said. “Renewing ourselves–”

San Li was peremptory. “Don’t be naive. It’s criticism along acceptable and correct lines–”

Ling intervened. “Every work unit has to turn over a set percentage of rightists, but that’s crazy, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s genius. Either way, it’s entirely systematic.”

The talk murmured on, never finding a way through or an idea they could all agree on.

Loosened by the wine, Sparrow’s thoughts drifted. Underneath the radio and the voices, he felt concealed, as if he really were a spy. Tomorrow he would arrive at his office at the Conservatory and continue his symphony. The four white walls, the plain desk and open space in his mind, could so spare a life be called freedom? He had been listening to Bach again. How had this composer from the West turned away from the linear and found his voice in the cyclical, in canons and fugues, in what Bach referred to as God’s time and in what the ancient Song and Tang scholars saw as the
continual reiterations of the past, the turning of the wheel of history? Campaigns, revolutions themselves, arrived in waves, ending only to start again. Could Bach’s limitations create another kind of freedom? Could an absence of freedom reveal the borders of their lives, their mortality, their fate? What if life and fate turned out to be the same thing? He shook the thought away. The wine was making him soft. He would have to stand up soon, find his bicycle and pedal home, and it would be up to his feet and legs to turn in circles. This room, he told himself, was an anomaly, perhaps one of many: corners of the city that had not yet been polished smooth. Zhuli would have understood, instinctively, what troubled him, she would have seen how the Professor and his friends were willing to
leave their allotted space and march to the centre of the stage. But all Sparrow wanted was time to sit in his room and write, he wanted to set down this music that came, unstoppable, unending, from his thoughts.

The Old Cat picked up the remaining book, opened it almost halfway and began to read grumpily. Her voice reminded him, with a pang, of his mother. The story was familiar to Sparrow even though he had never encountered this book before.

She read, “Grandfather smiled sympathetically, but did not tell Cuicui what had gone on the night before. He thought to himself: ‘If only you could dream on forever. Some people become the prime minister in their dreams.’ ”

—

The glasses were emptied and the books packed away. So as not to attract attention, they left at intervals: the Old Cat and Ling, followed by San Li, Sparrow and finally the Professor. Kai, who was leaning against the wall by the door, touched Sparrow’s arm lightly as he passed through. In the hallway, Sparrow stood listening, but instead of the Professor or Kai, all he heard was the belligerent clamouring of the radio, of all the radios in the building. The entire city, he realized, would soon be deaf, and that would be the end of his musical career.

He wished that a week had already passed, and that he was, at this very moment, returning up the concrete stairs to Kai’s room. If only he were just now lifting his hand to knock, waiting to be allowed inside. Instead of leaving he might, at this moment, be arriving.

—

Early the next morning, when Zhuli entered Room 103,
Tzigane
became the only Shanghai. Hours later, she emerged humbled and electrified. The sky was blue-grey as if it had swallowed all the Mao coats in the city. She heard Ravel (
Tzigane
), Prokofiev (Sonata for Solo Violin No. 4) and Bach (Partita for Solo Violin No. 2), each on a separate channel as if she were standing between three concert halls. On Julu Road, cyclists seemed to branch out from the music itself; they disappeared in the fog of July sunshine. She walked east on Changde Road and west again. A line of tricycle carts, weighed down by oil drums, creaked north and commuters parted around them like shoals of fish, their trousers fluttering. Time slowed.

A woman shouted at her to get out of the way and a flatbed truck, crusted in mud, nearly knocked her down as it rushed by. “Are you deaf?” a little boy shouted. He was holding a stick for no reason. He ran away with his weapon. “Capitalist Miss!” a woman spat at her, but when Zhuli turned to look back, the woman was gone. On and on she walked until she found herself back at the Conservatory once more. The courtyard and the building were deserted, as if it were Spring Festival and all the musicians had gone home for the holidays.

Her footsteps echoed nervously in the empty hallways. She went up to Sparrow’s office, but when she knocked, no one answered.

On the third floor, her class, the orchestral class, appeared to be cancelled. Out of some fifty students, only six were present. Nobody looked up when she came in. The Professor, known as Go Slow, was missing. Eventually the other five students wandered off. The now empty room seemed to close in around her. An aimless
inspection of her schoolbag revealed a copy of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which she had borrowed from the library days ago and had been carrying in her schoolbag without realizing. Zhuli opened it across six desks. The copy was dirty, smudged by pencil marks and eraser dust. Beethoven, she knew, had never intended for this concerto to have so feudal a name as “Emperor.” The name had attached itself long after his death. She followed the solo piano through its ascents and tumbling falls, and into the second movement, a B major dream and sorrow extending like a paper accordion.

If there was indeed an emperor in this concerto, she concluded, he was not a king at all, but a man with ambitions of greatness, an emperor in his own mind, a child who once imagined a different life but had come to see the disconnection between what he aspired to be and what he was capable of being. In 1811, when Beethoven was almost fully deaf, he performed this piano concerto, but the music that the composer heard in his mind failed to move his listeners. The performance was a disaster and, until his death, Beethoven rarely performed again. But what had mattered most in that moment, Zhuli wondered: the concerto in his mind or the concerto of his audience? What mattered most in this moment: the words on the posters or the lives–of her parents, of Ba Lute and Sparrow–in suspension, the promise of Mao Zedong thought or the day-to-day reality of New China? Which would win out, the Shanghai of utopia, or the city of the real?

She heard shouting. “Down! Down! Down!” they chanted. Footsteps thundered into the classrooms and stairwells. Furniture crashed above her head. Zhuli heard the strange dislocation of piano notes, she heard hammering and laughing and then, unmistakably, the smell of fire. She tucked the score in her bag, went out of the side door and into the courtyard, and hurried home.

—

That night, Ba Lute told her that she should cut her hair, that the long braid that slid against the small of her back was a symbol of
vanity. “Cut it right to your chin,” her uncle said. “Why can’t you wear it like the other girls?” Zhuli felt a shiver of fear, but she agreed. “Here, I’ll do it for you,” he said anxiously. A rusty pair of scissors, normally used to cut chicken, already lay on the table. “No, uncle,” she said. “It’s too much trouble. I’ll ask my mother to cut it.”

“Your mother! But where is she? I’ve no idea where those two have gone! There hasn’t been a single letter or message.”

“Then I will wait.”

“Today, little Zhuli. We must do it today.”

He had lost weight and seemed to stand crookedly. His straw shoes made a weak, scraping noise against the floor.

“I will, uncle.”

When he had retreated, she saw her mother’s copy of the Book of Records on a chair beside the kindling, as if Ba Lute meant to burn it. Zhuli picked up the cardboard box and took it to her room. On the bed, she lifted the lid. She could not stop herself from withdrawing a notebook at random and opening it. Wen the Dreamer’s refined yet passionate script moved her all over again. Her parents seemed to rest in her hands, as if the novel had never been a mirror of the past, but of the present. What if Da-wei and May Fourth, separated for so many years, still wandered as exiles, and this was the reason the novel could not be finished? Missing her parents, Zhuli followed her father’s handwriting down the page. In the story, Da-wei lay awake in his New York dormitory as jazz and German lullabies crowded through the rooms, men argued and women laboured, a child wept in its newfound English, new to Da-wei as well, and he marvelled at everything he might one day understand. Month after month, he worked odd jobs. He repeatedly mended his cap and padded coat, thinking that soon, tomorrow, his life would be reinvented. Lonely and bored, he copied pages from
The Travels of Lao Can
, the only book he had carried from China until, on a desolate spring day, he ran out of paper. He sat staring at the iron beauty of the Hudson River, remembering a passage from a famous Lu Xun essay: