Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (31 page)

“What’s the use of copying those?” a friend had asked Lu Xun.

“There’s no use.”

“In that case, what’s your reason for copying them?”

“There’s no reason.”

What was the purpose, Da-wei finally asked himself, of copying a life but erasing himself?

When Zhuli woke, she was alone and in Shanghai once more. It was morning but still dark and she felt an extraordinary peace, a calm willingness to give in to the destiny of her life. Prokofiev’s
Violin Sonata
No. 2 rang in her head as if she had been practising in her sleep. She returned Chapter 16 to the Book of Records, and hid the cardboard box beneath her bed. In the kitchen, she saw the chicken scissors on the table and she put them in her bag. Outside, the air was wonderfully cool. She felt that everyone was awake but no one spoke; the shutters were closed, but all the neighbours watched. The scissors made her feel strong and prepared for all eventualities. She passed a wall that was covered in meticulously flowing calligraphy:

IF THE FATHER IS A HERO, SO IS THE SON! IF THE FATHER IS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY, THE SON MUST BE A SON OF A BITCH! DIG OUT THE CHILDREN OF RIGHTISTS, CAPITALIST ROADERS, AND COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES, DIG OUT THE SNAKES OF THE OLD REGIME! LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO, LONG LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT, LONG LIVE THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION!

Prokofiev continued, the third movement now, with its poetic sweep, the violin teetering on discordant notes while the orchestra carried on, oblivious. Prokofiev was a world-weary, cantankerous grandfather shuffling ahead of her, a celebrated pianist whose sonatas sang as if they had been written for the violin. After his return from a tour in 1938, his passport was confiscated. In the campaigns
that followed, his music was denounced by the Politburo as formalist, bourgeois and counter-revolutionary and he never composed again. Sparrow had told her that when Prokofiev died, in 1953, there were no flowers to be had because all the city’s flowers had been rounded up for Stalin’s death, which had occurred a few days earlier. People had made do with paper flowers instead. Sparrow had heard it from the conductor, Li Delun, who had been studying in Moscow at the time. Because of the grandeur of Stalin’s funeral, no musicians were available to play for Prokofiev, and so his family played a recording of the funeral march from Romeo and Juliet. The first 115 pages of the newspaper carried tributes to Stalin; on page 116, there was a small notice on the death of the great composer.

Her long braid touched the small of her back, a pressure like her mother’s hand guiding her through the invisible, ever-watching crowds.

—

Just before dawn, Sparrow looked up to see a figure standing in the doorway of his office. He put down his pencil. Kai stepped into the light and yet, in the same moment, seemed to disappear. In just two weeks, since their return to the city, he had lost weight. There was a confusion in his eyes, and he appeared much older than his seventeen years. “Am I disturbing you, Teacher?”

“Come in.”

Kai turned and looked over his shoulder. He retraced his steps, reached the door and shut it, and the click of the lock sent a chill down Sparrow’s spine. He stood up and busied himself with the thermos. The teacups clinked mildly against the table and Kai sat down in Old Wu’s chair. Old Wu had not shown up in the office for at least a month and his desk was covered in a film of dust.

“You didn’t come to class yesterday,” Sparrow said.

“Did anybody come?”

He lifted the cups and turned back to Kai. “Two students.”

“Let me guess,” Kai said, smiling in an off-putting way. “Was it–”

“No, don’t. It isn’t important. Tell me how you are. I haven’t seen you since…well, since a few nights ago.”

“I’m fine,” Kai said. “Don’t I look it?” He smiled again but this time it was warmer, meant for Sparrow. “Teacher,” he said. Then, beginning again, “Comrade, you must be the only one in the building. Do you never rest?”

“Isn’t Zhuli here?”

“What time is it?” he said distractedly, standing up and coming to where Sparrow was. “Around four, I imagine.”

“The best time for composing. It’s like another world.”

Kai took the tea and peered out the window.

When Sparrow followed his gaze, he saw only the darkness. I’m a teacher, the eldest son of a revolutionary hero, Sparrow told himself, and there’s no reason for me to be afraid. “Is something worrying you?” he asked.

“No,” Kai said. And then, more credibly, “No, I don’t think so. It’s quiet tonight.” He shifted and Sparrow noticed the armband on the pianist’s sleeve.

“Have you joined the Red Guards then,” he said touching the red cloth.

“Joined?” Kai said, his hand resting overtop of Sparrow’s. His voice was lightness itself. “People like me don’t join anymore. We are Red Guards, that’s all.”

We, Kai meant, as in those with revolutionary class backgrounds. Uneasy with the subject, he searched for another but could think only of Kai’s adoptive father and his dream of a great musical community. “How is Professor Fen?” he said, pulling his hand back.

“The same,” Kai said. “Superior and forgiving as always, even though his students at Jiaotong have begun denouncing him. He’s convinced this campaign is a little jolt, nothing more. A few denunciations and it will all blow over. He applauds their revolutionary fervour.” Kai sipped his tea and set the cup down noiselessly. “Maybe he’s right. He usually is.”

“This new campaign is just beginning,” Sparrow said.

“The Professor thinks it’s still 1919 and the era of New Culture,” Kai said bitterly, as if he had not heard him. “He really thinks that he can have these open discussions just as they did back then, that everything and anything is up for debate. His position has made him naive! The worst is that he’s dragging San Li and Ling down with him. They’re devoted followers. They mistakenly believe he has the ear of the Party. If something happens to Ling, I’ll never forgive him.”

The only light in the room was a candle flickering unevenly. There must be a draft, Sparrow thought, looking up into the darkened corners.

“I nearly had an exit visa,” Kai said, “but yesterday…everything fell apart. The Professor arranged for me to study in Leipzig, he had arranged it through a contact in the Premier’s office. But it’s all gone. I didn’t tell you because…it’s not that I don’t want to stay and serve the Revolution…I was waiting until I had the exit visa in my pocket. It was only a matter of days. The visa was already approved, the last steps were formalities. But now…this morning, the cadre who signed my papers was denounced. They say he’s going to be expelled from the Party…Teacher, what if suspicion filters down to the Professor and to me? The Professor tells me not to worry. He says his brothers and his wife died at the hands of the Kuomintang and the Japanese, they died as revolutionary heroes and therefore he is untouchable. It is his right, his right, he says, to criticize the Party and its policies because of his family’s status. He sees nothing, hears nothing! My whole life was about to be transformed but now…if I can’t get out, what will happen to me?”

The pianist caught himself. He put his hands around his elbows and stood very still. “I have to leave,” he said, more calmly now. “I want the same overseas ticket that Fou Ts’ong got by sheer will and talent.
It is the only thing I have ever wanted
.”

How much like Zhuli the young pianist was, Sparrow thought
numbly. How strange he had never noticed it before. They believed they could attain what the Party had put beyond their reach, that they could strive and strive and go unpunished for their longings. From where had this blind ambition come?

“You must take precautions,” Sparrow said. His own words surprised him. Had it always come so naturally, he wondered, to speak words that didn’t suit him?

“Yes,” Kai nodded, relieved. “I must.”

“Perhaps,” Sparrow continued, “you should go down to your home village for a few days. In any case, classes have been suspended. Didn’t you say there was a piano there? You could continue to practise. There’s your concert, after all, in just a few months.”

“Yes,” Kai said again. And then, absent-mindedly, “I’ll play Beethoven, of course. Concerto No. 1 or, well, I don’t know, No. 5. I’ve always preferred the later works. But do you think No. 5 is too full of sentiment? The second movement worries me.” He hummed a few bars and stopped, contemplating. Kai had cut his hair, it was close-cropped now, accentuating the graceful line of his neck. Sparrow glanced out the window again, fearful that someone was watching them. There was nothing.

“I’ve interrupted you,” Kai said, shifting closer. His eyes seemed perilously bright. “I’ve come with all my problems as usual and here you are, always working. You’re the only one I know whose attachment to music is completely pure. You’re the one who deserves to go abroad.”

“No,” Sparrow said. He didn’t know how to answer. “It’s no interruption. Actually, I was thinking of you.” His Symphony No. 3 lay on his desk, the first three movements taped roughly together, beside a copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records. His pencil had rolled off the table and now lay on the floor. Sparrow picked it up and placed it carefully across the pages.

“Teacher Sparrow, we rely on each other, don’t we? Even though we don’t judge things the same way, we understand one another. I don’t know when I began to trust you. I know we’re the same.”

Sparrow had stepped to the side, opening a distance between them. He kept turning away, out of shyness and confusion.

“I know I must sound selfish to you,” Kai said. “I’m honestly worried about the Professor. So many people have come and gone from his study groups and everyone knows his views, he takes no pains to hide them, he says things that could be misunderstood and he’s blind to the consequences…”

On the desk, the pencil was rolling from side to side as if in the gutter of the sidewalk. Sparrow put his hand down to still it. “I’d like to hear those pieces you mentioned,” he said. “It’s been so long since I properly listened to them.” He went to Old Wu’s record player and picked out Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5.

He knelt down, lifted the plastic lid, and shifted the record from its cover. The disc, a recording made by Glenn Gould, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was in near perfect condition. He had not listened to it in some time.

Kai had picked up Chapter 17 and was reading the first page.

Sparrow set the needle down as carefully if he were setting it in the palm of a child’s hand. At a very early age, Sparrow thought, his mind rambling, he had known that he would not be a performer, he did not have the genius of interpretation, even if he played well enough. Sparrow’s gifts were of a different temperament. There was music inside him, it was as simple, inexplicable and exhilarating as that. Music overflowed from everything he saw. If it ended, he would have no idea how to make sense of the world. The record began to spin and the first sound was the sound of air. This was a room in America, he thought, perhaps a studio or a concert hall. Perhaps, he thought, technology was what had made Zhuli and Kai both naive and ambitious, they had grown up kneeling before record players and radios, they had been lulled into believing there were no barriers between themselves and the sound itself. The ubiquity of recording had made them all equal: they heard the same recording that Gould himself listened to when he placed the record on a turntable, they heard what an American or a
Frenchman or a German heard. Geography, ethnicity or nationality were not the determining factors; the degree of your listening was what set your experience apart, your intimacy with music was all that mattered, your attentiveness and your desire. But was it true? What if true understanding was something innate, something they could never attain? The music began, the first heroic chords.

There were days in my life, he thought, that I passed over as though they were nothing and there are moments, seconds, when everything comes into focus.

Kai was sitting beside him now, still holding the notebook. Sparrow distracted himself by thinking about Bach. Between the thousands of pieces the composer left behind, had Bach ever known silence? Surely never. How was it possible for Bach to feel so much and not to shy away from it? But in my life, Sparrow thought, I think there is a quiet coming now. He felt so certain of it that a sharp pain spread across his chest. A deep silence was about to arrive. How could he live with it?

“Chairman Mao is right,” Kai was saying. “Somewhere along the way, the ideas of the older generation became corrupted. People like the Professor started off wanting to build a just society but then they got comfortable. They became decadent and felt they’d given up enough, and the rules applied to everyone but them. So what are we supposed to do? Everything they’ve taught me contradicts itself. Maybe they told more lies than truth.”

“What the Party wants is always changing,” Sparrow said quietly.

“I don’t agree. Either we accept the old world where we as a nation are weak and humiliated or we try again and make a better country. I know how unjust it was. Sometimes I think I have no right to be here. I ask myself why I alone among my family was saved…What about my sisters, my parents? Weren’t they equal citizens?…When justice shifts, nobody can be left as they were. Isn’t that so? Hasn’t Chairman Mao always seen much further than we are able to?”

They were sitting as near to one another as possible without touching. The music filled the space between them, its motifs turning over as if the composer had no conclusion, only movements that came around in a spiral, rising each time to a new beginning but an old place.

“Is this a novel?” Kai said, returning Chapter 17 to him.

“It’s a story that’s been in my family for many years.” The notebook was so worn, and the weight utterly familiar in Sparrow’s hand.

“Do you think I could read it one day?”

Sparrow nodded.

Kai continued as if speaking to himself. “Not now but one day. That’s what I hope for. I wasn’t trying to flatter you, Sparrow. A talent like yours comes along only once in a generation. You must finish your Symphony No. 3, no matter what happens.”